Securing Stakeholder Buy-In
A Guide to Getting Approval and Support for Our Product Vision and Roadmap
Written by Amy Peltonen
When planning our products, we know that crafting a compelling product vision and roadmap is just the beginning. The real challenge lies in getting our stakeholders on board. Why is this so crucial? It’s simple: without their buy-in, even our best-laid plans can fall flat. Here’s why securing stakeholder buy-in matters, and how to do it effectively.
Vision/Roadmap Buy-In: Why It’s Important
First, it’s essential that stakeholders understand what’s coming . We need to ensure that they grasp the full scope of our plans and the rationale behind them. This comprehension leads to buy-in, where stakeholders not only agree with the plan but also believe in its potential benefits. Additionally, to see our vision come to fruition, we almost always need support from other departments. Soliciting their cooperation early can pave the way for smoother execution. Without stakeholders fully embracing our product vision and roadmap, even the most promising plan can face significant challenges. Here's a look at some of the pitfalls we might see if we fail to get buy-in from our stakeholders:
-
Misaligned Goals Produce Misaligned Execution
Without buy-in, different departments could end up pursuing conflicting objectives, leading to a misalignment with the overall vision. This dissonance can create confusion and undermine the unified direction needed for our successful product development and launch.
Insufficient Resources Starve the Project of What’s Needed
Stakeholder buy-in often translates into resource allocation—be it time, budget, or personnel. Without their support, securing the necessary resources becomes a struggle, hampering the execution of our roadmap.
-
Departmental Silos Lead to Resources that Help the Department, Not Customers
When stakeholders aren’t on board, departments can operate in silos, focusing solely on their priorities rather than collaborating towards a common goal. This lack of cooperation can lead to inefficiencies and missed opportunities for synergy. For example, I once encountered a missed opportunity for synergy when implementing an eCommerce flow for my product. My UX designer put together a beautiful design for an update to a legacy procurement flow, and we were all queued up for implementation. Unbeknownst to me, another team was also re-designing that flow, without consideration for our planned use. While we eventually got aligned, being on board with each other’s initiatives early on would have saved us a significant amount of effort.
Resistance to Change Hampers Adoption
Stakeholders who aren’t invested in our vision often resist changes or new initiatives, creating roadblocks that can slow down progress and lead to frustration among team members. For example, if our customer support team hasn’t bought into the need for our new feature, the perception can be that it’s simply one more thing they need to learn and an additional reason that someone might call in to complain. But if customer support understands how the feature actually solves a problem for customers or diverts support calls, they will be more eager to learn how the new feature works and add it to their support toolkit.
-
Lack of Buy-In Yields Half-Assed Work
Without the backing of key departments, parts of our roadmap might be poorly executed or left incomplete. For instance, without engineering’s commitment, technical aspects might be inadequately developed; without marketing’s support, product launches might lack the necessary promotional push to be successful.
Direction Without Credibility Leads to Low Morale and Engagement
Teams that sense a lack of unified direction or support from leadership may experience low morale and engagement. This can affect productivity, creativity, and the overall quality of work. When I instituted quarterly roadmap reviews at my startup, I visibly witnessed a lightening of our teams’ attitudes, and saw greater productivity - particularly from our engineers.
-
Budget Constraints Can Delay the Launch – Or Stop it in its Tracks
The finance department needs to be on board to approve budgets. Without their buy-in, securing the necessary funding for our product initiatives can be an uphill battle, potentially leading to budget cuts or financial shortfalls. We definitely don’t want to be faced with having to deal with resource cuts, especially after we might have already communicated a roadmap with dates.
Operational Inefficiencies Can Have a Real Impact on the Bottom Line
Accounting, Support, and IT departments play a critical role in ensuring operational smoothness. Their lack of buy-in can result in unresolved technical issues, increased customer support calls, and overall operational inefficiencies or disruptions. In one example where I didn’t personally interface with our collections team before making a product change, our customers didn’t get billed correctly after a platform migration! In this case (not my proudest moment, but a great learning experience), there was a real revenue impact that could have been avoided if I had cleared my plans with this important stakeholder in advance.
-
Misaligned Product-Market Fit Leads to Product Failure
Without input and agreement from sales and marketing, our product might not align well with market needs or customer expectations. This misalignment can lead to poor market reception, low sales, and high customer churn rates. While getting direct customer input on new features is ideal, the internal folks who have a deep understanding of our target customer personas can provide great insights.
Execution Problems Weigh Us Down with a Competitive Disadvantage
Failing to present a unified, well-supported product vision can give our competitors an edge. Without cross-departmental support, our product could lag in innovation, quality, or customer satisfaction, putting our company at a competitive disadvantage. Especially customer-facing stakeholders can help identify not only impactful new features, but also what parts of those features could truly delight customers and set us apart from our competition. Obtaining and using that insight can make our go to market execution much more effective.
-
Failures Erode Our Credibility
When our product team has repeated failures due to lack of stakeholder buy-in, our credibility is eroded. This loss of trust can make it even harder to secure buy-in for future initiatives. In one role I was in, we had a technical implementation hurdle that wasn’t identified until after the feature was launched, and we had to step back our “free” offering to make it a paid engagement. After that, our head of account management blocked the announcement of new features to our existing customers.
Silent Stakeholders Handicap Growth and Innovation
Innovative ideas often require broad support and cooperation to come to fruition. Without stakeholder buy-in, our company may miss out on growth opportunities, leading to stagnation and an inability to keep pace with industry advancements. If stakeholders don’t feel bought into the product, they’re less likely to share their thoughts on great ideas for improvements.
How to Secure Buy-In
Be Clear About Objectives and Benefits
We should start by clearly outlining our objectives and how they will benefit the company. You’ve probably already heard about the “SMART” acronym for setting goals (Specific, Measurable, Achievable, Relevant, and Time-bound), and that’s a good tool to use. For product management, I’ve found that a couple of these parameters are especially relevant:
Achievable
Do we actually have control of this objective? When tasked with an objective of shortening the time it takes to onboard new clients, we soon realized that while we did have a part to play, the product actually was a very minor part of the delays in the process – most notably, those due to customer schedules. Because we didn’t have control over the main blockers to onboarding, this became a very tough objective to meet. When we’re setting objectives, we want to choose one that can be materially affected by our product enhancements.
How challenging will it be to meet this objective? If it’s too aggressive, it’s demotivating, and people will stop trying to achieve it. However, if it’s too easy, it’s not actually meaningful and won’t inspire the team. It’s tricky but important to find the right balance between an objective that will be achievable and also challenging.
Measureable
Is it possible to actually measure the progress toward this objective? For example, if our objective is about increasing customer satisfaction, how will we deem that satisfaction has been either improved or eroded? Are we going to survey our customers to gather this data? If so, do we have the proper mechanisms and processes in place to actually gather this feedback? When we have the data capture mechanisms and processes in place, can we get enough participation to achieve statistically significant results?
Measuring objectives can be a challenge, especially when they’re “soft” (e.g. opinion-based), but it’s very important to establish measurement criteria because otherwise it’s unclear whether the objective has actually been met. How will we know when to celebrate this achievement if we can’t say for certain whether the objective has been achieved? Furthermore, it’s important to track our progress against the objective to ensure that what we’re doing is moving us in the right direction. Without being measurable, there’s no way to know where we’re at in our journey.
Demonstrate Thorough Preparation
Showing that we’ve done our homework is a powerful way to build credibility with others. We present evidence-based data to support our plan and are upfront about potential risks and challenges. Engaging stakeholders in discussing these risks can often lead to creative solutions to mitigate those risks and secure greater buy-in, especially if we incorporate the suggestions we receive.
Speak Their Language
Understanding the context and goals of each stakeholder group is vital. (Hint: As product leaders, getting to know our stakeholders and their goals/needs is part of doing our homework.) Speaking in their language while showing how our roadmap will help them achieve their goals tells a powerful story that is more likely to resonate with them than one that is purely focused on our product goals.
“You can only use the tools that your audience has access to. If you start with your language, your concepts, your assumptions, your values, you will fail. So instead, start with theirs. It’s only from that common ground that they can begin to build your idea inside their minds.”
As we think about how we can achieve this relevancy, here are some typical goals that each department might have on their minds:
We also must remember that our manager is a stakeholder. Our vision and roadmap should align with their personal goals and objectives, including those of the department. Our manager also cares about the credibility of the department across the organization. They’ll want assurance that we’ve done our homework before approaching other departments, and feel comfortable that we aren’t going to upset any of their colleagues with our proposal. We should always review our vision and roadmap with our manager before soliciting buy-in from other stakeholders.
Finally, remember that executives appreciate visuals. Always think about opportunities to use graphs, timelines, and concise, impactful words to convey our message.
From Permission/Approval to Support/Sponsorship
Securing a simple thumbs-up is just the beginning. True buy-in means having stakeholders ready to support and sponsor our vision actively. This transition from mere approval to enthusiastic sponsorship is crucial. Without it, pushing our plan forward can feel like an uphill battle.
What to Look for When Building Support
When seeking approval, we should look for signs that stakeholders are genuinely engaged. If they don’t have objections to our plan but are not asking how they can help, we might have approval but not real support. This can lead to dysfunction, as I’ve seen in my own experience.
I was starting a new product within my company that represented a strategic horizontal market expansion. Our plan was to leverage existing company resources while launching in a new category, to take advantage of synergies that we already had in the market. When my company’s head of engineering approved my vision and roadmap, I was happy to have checked that box. However, when our external team had the code written, tested, and our f irst release ready for deployment, the engineering head would not allow us to do our own deployment. Furthermore, he had not set aside capacity on his team to deploy for us. This unfortunately caused a major slowdown of our launch. Not only was this personally frustrating, but it also represented a missed opportunity for our business as competitors were able to move faster and capture more market share with their first-mover advantage.
Walking each team through our expectations of the support we’ll need from them is a good test for whether we have true support for our roadmap. If we’re met with concerns or blockers, we know that our stakeholder isn’t truly bought in and we still have work ahead of us to achieve alignment. Here are some ideas for areas we might probe on when testing for support from different departments:
-
Can our engineers use your existing dev/test/staging environments, or would you prefer that our team uses standalone environments?
If existing, will your team have time set aside to do our deployments for us, or can we do our own deployments? Will your team set aside time to test our integrated code and ensure that there are no conflicts/issues that might affect our other code areas?
If standalone, will your team set up and maintain those environments for us? How do you propose that we avoid code conflicts or other issues? Will you have a resource that can help identify areas of code overlap?
How often will your team lead be available to provide feasibility assessments and swags?
How will your team provide visibility into progress and surface requirements questions/suggestions?
-
What will be the best way to focus your team’s quotas and training on the new target market outlined in the vision document?
What is a good forum for soliciting market feedback from your team on prospects’ reactions to our new features?
Can we set aside a formal channel for reporting competitive intelligence gathered at trade shows, through prospect conversations, etc.?
-
What do you think would be the best channels for generating awareness of our product with these new features, eventually leading to purchase?
How much budget do you see being set aside for marketing this improved product?
Who from your team will be the owner of the marketing plan and execution for this product?
-
How much do you see these new features improving customer retention?
When can we meet with your team to provide insight on this new roadmap and training on new features?
Do you have any ideas on the best way(s) to let our existing customers know about these new features after they’re live?
-
What is the best way for us to train your team so they’re ready to support customers who have questions about using these new features?
Can your team regularly spend time with us to provide first-hand input into customer pain points with our product, including the new features we’ve rolled out?
-
How much budget can be allocated toward the development and promotion of the features on this roadmap? And when will that money be available?
Are there any procedural considerations that need to be accommodated in order to get our vendors paid?
If we see hesitation when asking these types of questions, we might dig deeper to understand any concerns up-front. Addressing these concerns early, even if it means making changes to accommodate blockers, is much better than finding out later that the resources we need to be successful are not available.
Navigating Organizational Challenges
The more matrixed our organization is, the harder it is to get things done without strong sponsorship. If leaders’ goals don’t align with ours, we might consider adapting the product to better fit their objectives. For example, let’s say we have a project on the roadmap to improve our internal analytics tracking and reporting, but our head of sales is looking for customer-facing features that will have a more direct effect on revenue growth. One way we might adapt is to move ahead with the project, but leverage that work to also include customer-facing analytics features that will be appealing to potential new customers.
If finding middle ground is not feasible, we can escalate the issue to our manager and/or enlist help from others. If our manager can re-set goals and/or objectives so they’re aligned between our teams, the chances of both teams being successful increases significantly. Or maybe there’s another department that we can help, and if we help them, they’re in a better position to support the department where we’re misaligned. If that’s the case, we can encourage the department heads to talk with each other about how this could be a win-win, even if indirectly. Soliciting help from a stakeholder’s peer is a good tactic especially if we’re relatively new to the organization and haven’t had a chance to build up our rapport and trust.
As a last resort, we can seek off-the-record assistance, but we must be mindful of the risks. When working on a skunkworks project for my company, I had no resources available for building reports to surface analytics data for strategic decision-making and creating status reports for the executive team. However, I had a friend in my small office who was a PowerBI expert on our company’s central data team. I knew from our water cooler conversations that he regularly had to sit around waiting for large data sets to load. Thanks to the rapport I had built with him, he was happy to use his downtime to build a set of autosyncing PowerBI reports for me that gave me what I needed. If we employ this strategy, though, we need to be careful about not asking for so much that it interferes with their other committed work. If their work suffers because they’re doing a side project for us, we could lose credibility with the department head, making it more difficult to work together on future initiatives.
Final Thoughts…
Securing stakeholder buy-in is a critical part of executing a successful product vision and roadmap, and it’s about more than just getting a green light. It’s about building a coalition of supporters who believe in our vision and are ready to help make it a reality. By understanding their goals, demonstrating thorough preparation, and clearly communicating the benefits, we can turn approval into active support and drive our product success forward. When we succeed at building a coalition around a launch plan that produces better success, it provides a tailwind for future launch planning, reflecting gains in team morale, leadership confidence, and overall momentum. This momentum helps achieve immediate objectives, and also lays a strong foundation for continued growth and innovation. With that momentum in place, our entire team is aligned and motivated for upcoming challenges and opportunities.
