The Problem Space is where we go to learn about our users’ problems so we can design and develop meaningful and profitable solutions to solve these problems. It’s also where we go to learn about our companies, our employees/coworkers, and ourselves, so we can create the best organizational conditions for success.
Can parables help with stakeholder management?
What's on my mind
Oh, those pesky stakeholders that just don't understand what it takes for us to do our work! How can we to make them understand our perspective?
Last week on LinkedIn, Rich Mironov posted some of his writing called The Hungry Man Parable.
As background, Rich wrote, "I talk with lots of executives from the go-to-market side of the house who think that building serious software is as easy – and easily estimatable – as building a fence."
To help them to better understand the process, he provided this parable:
Rich went on to explain that CEOs and GTM-side executive are not interested in the details - and that much of what we say sounds like excuses.
His advice: rather than push details onto those who have a totally different frame of reference, we should try to understand their perspective and talk to them in their own language.
Rich lays this out in another great post called Why Product Request SLAs Fail.
Sound familiar, researchers and designers?
This interaction inspired me to write my own parable, perhaps to encourage the rest of us in non-GTM roles? Here it is:
Have you had success sharing details to get leadership to understand how you "make the sauce"?
Or has it worked better to simply take their perspective and speak in the language of their motivations?
Best of LinkedIn (this week)
Andrea Saez posted about a founder who recently came to her with this message: "I don’t want to hire product managers… they’re so far removed from speaking to customers, I’d rather have CSMs train to have product skills."
Moodi Mahmoudi posted about a Forbes article that makes the case for product discovery. One of his favorite quotes: "Today, your product is more than your core services. It's your central channel for sales, marketing and where your customer support happens."
Erika Flowers wrote about the phenomenon of LinkedIn collaborative AI articles: "It’s like self-checkout. It’s meant to get us to do the work of training an ML model on user data to sell, asking us to contribute content for the LinkedIn customer: advertisers and the organizations who buy user data."
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As a special end-of-year offering, I've decided to open up my three-session coaching package just for the next couple months.
My clients say this was a great way to use up their personal training budget, and the coaching helped them end the year (and look forward to the next!) on a positive note.
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The Problem Space
by Janelle Ward
The Problem Space is where we go to learn about our users’ problems so we can design and develop meaningful and profitable solutions to solve these problems. It’s also where we go to learn about our companies, our employees/coworkers, and ourselves, so we can create the best organizational conditions for success.
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