Attended @gcmouli’s Unboxing PM – Sakeholder management session last Saturday. Organised by @nextbigwhat and moderated by @cnha. 📅 Excellent session full of real life examples and actionable insights 🚀🚀 Few takeaways for me in the thread below: 👇
1) Diligence+ thoughtfulness 🧠> agility Need to keep this in mind in the ‘move fast and break things’ culture.
2) PMs are expected to empathize, influence and educate the bigger picture. Expected to dive deep and have a 30k feet view. 📈 It is a tough job 🙂
3) Relationships matter 🤝🤝- The examples Mouli gave were on point and very relatable.
4) One pager in prose (or 6) >> verbal discussion Writing in prose helps. ✍️✍️ Actionable tips on how to send a document in advance and following up with decision makers to give their feedback.
5) Disagree and commit. Write down that somewhere, though! Be assertive when the idea proposed by you doesn’t get accepted but back it with data. If things don’t work and you had ‘told them so’, document the same without blaming anyone with an intention to help the group learn.
6) When working towards consensus or solving tough problems, go with a ‘learn’ attitude than a ‘solve’ attitude. 🤔
7) Identify the key decision makers and ways to work with them. The oldest engineering manager may may be more influential than the newly appointed CTO. 🙂 💼💼
8) The loudest guys may not always be the most effective. 🗣🗣 This is a skill I would like to master by remembering that ‘it is not essential to be extroverted and forceful to be good at stakeholder management’
9) How to build relationships in a pandemic- Schedule 1:1 conversations with no agenda other than to get to know people. 👋 👋 Since you cannot meet people over coffee, this can help break ice and get to know the real people behind the camera. – end of thread-
