EMPOWERED

CHAPTER 72Stakeholder Management vs. Collaboration

You might have noticed that we have not talked much about the topic of “stakeholder management” in this book. That's because this term represents a mindset that is more often a trait of feature teams and less so for empowered product teams.

Now, don't misunderstand this. I'm not saying that empowered product teams don't have to pay attention to stakeholders. I'm saying that it's a different relationship.

Recall that in feature teams, they are there to serve the business, and usually “the business” is represented by one or more stakeholders that must be “managed” so that the team does not get overwhelmed with demands and requests.

For most feature teams, the most dreaded aspect of the product manager role is dealing with the stakeholders. The product managers of feature teams feel like they can never make all the various stakeholders happy. There simply is not enough time, or enough people, and sometimes the requests from the stakeholders don't even make sense.

Again, I'm not suggesting that empowered product teams can or should ignore these stakeholders, but they do have a fundamentally different relationship—one that I find is much more constructive and conducive to innovation.

In an empowered product team, the team is there to serve customers, with products that customers love, yet work for the business. The stakeholders are partners we need to collaborate with to come up with solutions that work (specifically, that means ...