Chapter 8. Achieving Alignment and Buy-in
What you’ll learn in this chapter
What alignment, consensus, and collaboration mean
How shuttle diplomacy can help you obtain input and buy-in
How to use a roadmap co-creation workshop to achieve alignment
“No plan survives contact with the enemy,” said Helmuth von Moltke the Elder. We would add: “or your stakeholders.”
You can create the best plan ever conceived, but it will work only if the people who fund it, execute it, and receive its output believe in it.
I was a product manager at a biotech startup years ago, and we were developing a new product that enabled our customers to extract and work with viral RNA. There was a software component that had to be written, optimized, and tested, as well as a reagent recipe that had to be refined and tested, all before release.
We were a 75-person company in total, so thankfully it was a relatively small team. However, separate teams were developing the software and reagent pieces, and the sales team was constantly begging me for release dates and sometimes directly reaching out to software or R&D. They had sales targets to hit and customers who were asking for the product. I had four other products in development, all utilizing the same finite software, research, and testing teams. My solution for all this? I created an Excel spreadsheet and listed out the products, product features, and release dates, then sent it by attachment to my colleagues.
Problem solved. I was a genius!
Not so fast.
I caused quite a few fire alarms with the sales team and the software engineering team. Surprisingly, the research team developing the reagents was actually thankful. I was curious: why was one team fine with my Excel spreadsheet while the others seemed enraged? Maybe the research team just wanted spreadsheets? Why were sales and engineering so upset?
—C. Todd Lombardo, 2006
What C. Todd created with this spreadsheet was not a product roadmap, but rather something more akin to a release schedule. Schedules are great. As humans, we love predictability: the train arrives at 3:04 p.m.; my flight leaves Monday at 5:14 p.m.; the meeting is at 10:30 a.m. Having something to refer to is important, but if that artifact doesn’t match up to others’ expectations, get ready for some heated conversations.
Lacking any other knowledge of product strategy (hey, it was early in his career!), C. Todd thought his schedule seemed the most rational approach, as it was intended to bring certainty to stakeholders who were clamoring for it. We all want permanence in an impermanent world. Silos, which is what C. Todd created when he went off on his own to make that Excel file, can kill enthusiasm and momentum for many things, especially a product. Unless you’re a company of one, you need your team to be on board with you. There is no substitute for a roadmap (and by now you know this differs from a release plan/schedule, or we haven’t done our job very well), and in order to create a roadmap, you need buy-in and alignment.
During the buy-in process, you’ll polish off the prioritization exercise you began in Chapter 7 and then prepare to document and share the roadmap to a broader range of stakeholders. The fact that the entire team has the opportunity to offer input will lower friction as you move toward alignment.
There’s no one right way to achieve buy-in, but there are definitely wrong ways to go about it. For example, although it might sound tempting to your caveman brain, beating everyone over the head with a stick works about as great as using molasses to brush your teeth. We won’t get into tall negotiation strategies and interpersonal tactics here. There are many other well-researched and well-written books for that. The three main vehicles we’ve seen successfully used to obtain alignment and buy-in on product roadmaps are shuttle diplomacy, meetings and workshops, and software applications (or some combination thereof).
Before we get into those approaches, though, we need to define exactly what we mean by alignment.
Alignment, Consensus, and Collaboration Walk into a Bar...
When we talk about alignment, we often think consensus or collaboration. They are similar yet different terms.
Alignment
This is a concerted effort to help people understand the issues and what their respective roles are. It means asking questions and listening to feedback both from the internal product team as well as external stakeholders. People with differing opinions can still align on their intentions. Alignment is not consensus.
Consensus
In theory, this means a group of people reaching a mutually agreed-upon decision. In practice, it often means hours of discussion leading to decisions that everyone supposedly agrees to, but that no individual can be held accountable for (“I didn’t vote for that!”). Once the decision has been made, if someone doesn’t like it, they can often be a barrier to its implementation.
Collaboration
This is when individuals cooperate to accomplish a common goal or outcome. Individuals work together for a shared purpose—they may not concur on everything each step of the way, but they do agree on the final outcome.
What do you need when you are a product person looking to get a roadmap in place or updated? Alignment and collaboration. You don’t need consensus to get your roadmap in place. Let’s repeat that: you do not need consensus to get your roadmap in place, nor do you need it to update your roadmap.
Let’s continue with more detail on your stakeholders. We discussed in Chapter 3 the importance of identifying your internal (and external) stakeholders, and it might be wise to map them out:
Now we’re ready to get into the “how” of achieving that alignment.
Shuttle Diplomacy
Greg [product manager] had been there for two years before me when I took over product. He had been struggling with that team for ages, because they could never come to a consensus on anything.
Timing was on my side: the executives had just been to a board meeting and presented their goals for the next year to the investors where they had four very crisp business-outcome goals clarified. Two were product oriented—the two essential ingredients to differentiation of our product. The other two were business objectives.
For one, the CEO had said, “I want disruption. I want game changing.” And the way I ended up translating that was “future potential revenue,” as we knew for sure we weren’t going to get revenue this year, but it was worth investing in because we might realize that [higher revenue] in the future. I was then able to do my prioritization matrix and sort everything in terms of things that looked like they had a high ROI to low ROI.
I went to each of the executives individually, and initially when I asked the executives about the goals they agreed, “Yes. Those are the goals.” We actually managed to skip past the usually difficult phase of just agreeing on the goals. The prior meeting set up the goals conversation for success.
During each of those meetings, I got out my spreadsheet—my scorecard with the goals at the top and all the ideas—and made sure all their ideas were on the spreadsheet. We discussed each and scored the ones that they cared about. I made sure that they felt like they were heard and had a chance to contribute.
Finally, we sat the whole group down in the room, and we came up with a roadmap in about an hour and a half. Greg came out of that room, astonished, “How did you do that? That was magic. I’ve never gotten those guys to agree on anything.” I replied, “It wasn’t magic. It was shuttle diplomacy.”
—Bruce McCarthy, 2011
Bruce’s story is straight from the playbook of Henry Kissinger when he “shuttled” between Middle East capitals as he sought to ease negotiations in the fallout of the October 1973 war.
Kissinger leveraged international toll lines, the White House’s hotline to Moscow, telegrams, couriers, recorded messages, transatlantic flights, and any other means of communication he could get his hands on. Because the parties could not—or more likely would not—speak with each other, Kissinger spoke to each of them individually. This turned out to be a blessing in disguise, as Kissinger could cut through any emotionally charged interactions and talk about things with them sympathetically and pragmatically. By acting as an intermediary and peace broker between the two sides, he appeared neutral and worked to incrementally improve the situation, rather than attempt a full-blown resolution.
There’s a lot of debate about the long-term outcomes of the situation; however, the tactic proved very useful in highlighting stakeholder needs in the negotiation process. For years after the ceasefire, Kissinger continued shuttling between the major players, and his efforts culminated in the 1979 Camp David Accords, considered the first peace treaty between Israel and an Arab state.
Shuttle Diplomacy for Product People
Shuttle diplomacy involves meeting with each party individually to reach decisions that require compromise and trade-offs. This approach can help manage and coordinate stakeholders to reach agreement on what the current and future product will be.
Political negotiators employ shuttle diplomacy when one or more of the parties refuse to recognize another party involved in the decision. For product professionals, this won’t likely be the case, although we’ve all had our share of teams where the friction is high. As a product person, you may find that (unlike some heads of state) your stakeholders are willing to meet together. However, we’ve found it’s often better if they don’t—at least at first.
Have you ever been in an executive meeting where each attendee is there just there to prove how smart they are? Or have you experienced it when the stronger voices in the room end up belittling or intimidating others? These political machinations can ruin your attempts at alignment. We’ve found the politics are much more manageable in one-on-one settings. Like Kissinger, you can focus the conversation on common goals if it’s just you and them, with nobody else in the room for them to answer to or try to impress.
Why Does Shuttle Diplomacy Work?
At each meeting, identifying the individual’s goals, priorities, and other considerations is the key to managing by shuttle diplomacy. These one-on-one meetings offer a feedback loop not only about the person’s thinking, but also whether it is in line with the organization’s goals and vision (see Chapter 4 on guiding principles). You build trust and rapport with each of these stakeholders, because you’re listening to them and asking them why and how things are important to them. If they keep pushing for something that doesn’t make sense in terms of the larger goals, that’s a hint that there’s an unwritten goal that needs to be discussed.
In addition, if there are any politics (or hidden agendas), an individual stakeholder is likely to reveal them to you if you’re receptive and able to build a close rapport, whereas they might not in a larger group meeting. You take all of the office politics out of it, because it’s just you and them talking about what’s best for the company, and not them trying to sound smart in front of the CEO, team, or board.
Finally, by giving each stakeholder the opportunity to have input early on (i.e., while the product roadmap is still a work in progress), the shuttle diplomacy process gives them authorship of the plan too. It’s not your plan anymore—it’s our plan. The co-creative nature of the roadmap process cannot be understated.
How to Engage in Shuttle Diplomacy
As we’ve mentioned, when engaging in shuttle diplomacy, you should entice your stakeholders with a draft of your roadmap and ask for their input. In the first part of your meeting, always tie it to the goals and objectives. You can use the simple acronym GROW to guide your conversation:
Goals
What are they trying to accomplish in the next X months?
Reality
What’s on their plate now? What’s recent?
Options
What do they think will help them achieve those goals?
What options have you already discussed that need to be revisited?
Way forward
Which of the options helps them achieve the goals they described earlier in the conversation? Which options are at the top of their list and why?
Shuttle Diplomacy Canvas
If GROW helps guide your conversation, the shuttle diplomacy canvas in Table 8-1 can help you track the meetings and move you toward final alignment and buy-in for your roadmap.
Here’s how it works:
For each stakeholder, track their desired outcomes, why they have those objectives, what metrics they use in achieving those outcomes, and what their top product priorities are. Also be sure to make a note of any additional considerations, such as office politics. This canvas is not intended for you to share across your team; rather, it is a useful guide for you to track your one-on-one conversations.
| Stakeholder | |||
|---|---|---|---|
| Joan, CEO | Mark, Sales | Jen, Engineering | |
Goals: | 15% y/y growth in profit | Hit $24MM in revenue in Q1 2017 | Grow team to meet new capacity, improve sprint velocity |
Reality: | Setting up company for scale | Missed last quarter’s target and scrambling to make up | Three teams each with differing velocity, demands for multiple feature delivery faster |
Options: | Platform stability | Client ABC, Inc requested new features and possibility of closing a deal | Platform stability |
Way forward: | Platform stability | Better onboarding | Platform stability |
What’s Difficult About Shuttle Diplomacy?
So what’s the downside to shuttle diplomacy? Simply put: the time it takes. Many consider meetings the bane of their existence and to add yet another one-on-one meeting may elicit an allergic response. The answer is to keep the meetings short and informal. Focus only on the issues a particular stakeholder cares about in the meeting with them, and ignore the rest of your list. Sometimes, a bunch of small meetings is actually easier to schedule than a big one with a lot of busy executives, but not always. Consider your organization and use your judgment.
Other potential challenges of shuttle diplomacy meetings include rapport and location.
Rapport
Some people you will get along with better than others. This is normal and natural. Your mileage may vary.
Location
One-to-one meetings are always better when you’re in person than when you’re remote. Sure, we all love (and/or hate) Google Hangouts, Go-to-Meeting, Join.me, Skype, WebEx, and Zoom, but there’s no substitute for an in-person meeting, as you’ll better build rapport with each stakeholder.
Even when you’ve met with each stakeholder one-on-one, you still may need to hold a meeting that brings everyone together. In fact, we recommend that you do this on a regular basis, perhaps every quarter or every year depending on the velocity of change in your business. This brings us to the co-creation workshop.
Meetings and Workshops
Once a shuttle-diplomacy process has been completed, pulling everyone together for a cross-functional meeting or workshop can be a very effective way to obtain final buy-in across the group of stakeholders. Likely there are some conflicts and trade-offs that will be made. This is normal and expected.
These meetings can be of two flavors: a formal presentation of recommendations or a co-creative workshop. Both serve to bring a team of stakeholders into alignment. This approach works with two key aspects: 1) when a culture exists that encourages constructive disagreement, so that people are comfortable voicing their opinions and leaders appreciate hearing them and 2) there is general agreement on the organization’s overall strategy, so that stakeholders can agree on how to make decisions.
Presenting Recommendations
Emily Tyson, Vice President of Product at NaviHealth brings together a product portfolio review group to evaluate the business on a quarterly basis and ensure alignment with the business priorities. During this meeting, the team would examine recent progress, reflect that with proposed changes, and consider how to allocate or reallocate resources.
Prior to the meeting, each team then did a few things (they might sound familiar!):
Gathered their inputs from their stakeholders (a la shuttle diplomacy-like) with information such as: What are priorities for sales? What are priorities from the clinical team? What does security need in the roadmap?
Performed a T-shirt sizing exercise for each proposed initiative to gauge the level of resources needed to execute.
Assembled business cases to answer the following questions: What’s the story around these initiatives? How does it fit with our company’s vision, with the long-term strategy, with the near-term strategy? How do we think about the competitive landscape, or the development times the market? What are the factors we should be considering when evaluating these?
With that in place, the team would present their proposal to the portfolio advisory meeting with their recommendations. This approach, with lots of “homework” up front and a formal “this is what we’re doing” to get sign-off from a steering committee or senior managers or executives is one way we often saw in larger, established organizations with a hierarchical structure.
Co-creation Workshop
Another approach we saw was to bring the stakeholders together for a workshop that is less of a present-the-plan and more a let’s-figure-this-out.
A co-creation workshop can follow a shuttle diplomacy effort; it’s a good way to bring all the stakeholders together to finalize the prioritization process. At times you may also be able to skip the one-on-one meetings and go straight to the big meeting/workshop—for example, teams where there are not a lot of stakeholders and/or where political agendas may not be overly prevalent might be well served by going straight to the workshop.
The workshop needs to have a clear plan and outcomes before you hold it. No one wants to go to another unnecessary meeting. Your outcomes are to finalize the roadmap for the upcoming period (year, quarter, etc.). You likely won’t be doing this weekly, biweekly, or even monthly. Most teams we spoke with do this quarterly, especially in the software world, where it often takes about three months to create and release anything of substance (beyond bug fixes and minor feature enhancements).
Workshop agenda
A co-creation workshop might loosely follow this agenda:
Intro and rules—5 min
Hopes and fears—10 min
Vision and goals—10 min
Back-plan—15 min
Sizing and prioritizing—40 min
Wrap-up—10 min
The intro and wrap-up are self-explanatory, but let’s take a closer look at the steps in between.
Hopes and fears
Hopes and fears is a simple exercise where each individual writes their hopes for the product’s future on one color of Post-it note or index card and then writes their fears on another color (one hope/fear per Post-it or card). The objective here is to draw out everyone’s emotional aspirations and fears and see how they align with each other and with the established business objectives. When we run this exercise, many types of visions (hopes) and roadblocks (fears) surface that otherwise would remain hidden or unsaid. Sometimes you just need to give people a platform to open up!
Vision and goals
If it is not already determined, an exercise to articulate the product vision could prove beneficial. As we discussed in Chapter 4, to articulate product vision, you can have everyone in the room follow this MadLibs prompt:
A world where the [target customer] no longer suffers from the [identified problem] because of [product differentiator] they [benefit].
And pare this down to:
To [benefit realized] by [product differentiator]
After writing this out on a large Post-it or index card, participants can then compare their responses. Or, as another option for establishing vision—taken from the book Gamestorming by Dave Gray, Sunni Brown, and James Macanufo (O’Reilly)—you can have participants complete the Cover Story exercise. Each participant draws the cover of a print or digital newspaper or magazine (e.g., Fast Company, TechCrunch, Mashable) five years in the future, after the roadmap has been implemented. What impact has this product made on the customer base? What change has it brought about? Make sure they include a headline, an image, a subheadline, a few sidebars, and a quote.
Back-plan
A great exercise to follow Cover Story or some other future envisioning exercise, a Back-plan starts with the end result of the cover story (i.e., the future that will result from the roadmap) and then works gradually backward to the present. Each step backward must be realistic, so teams are forced to think through all the different changes necessary. For example, if the product vision is that solo business travelers have a satisfying time dining with strangers while traveling, what’s the first step backward from that? One option is that they have a way to search for a desirable local restaurant while traveling to an unknown area.
Sizing and prioritizing
Next on the agenda is a sizing and prioritizing step. One exercise that’s helpful for narrowing down ideas is the $100 (or €, £, ¥, Ƀ, etc.) test, also from Gamestorming. In this exercise, each participant is given a limited amount of currency to “invest” in particular customer needs. A variation on this is to break down the aspects of each theme into desirability, feasibility, and viability, and then have only those responsible for each area invest in that category (so stakeholders invest according to their category). Then you tally up the results, as shown in Table 8-2.
For reasons we describe in Chapter 7, we don’t believe voting is a good way to prioritize. It is, however, a good way to narrow your focus to a manageable list for discussion.
These are a mere handful of workshop exercises that can help bring a team into alignment. There are many others that can do similar, and these can help a team arrive at the final decisions together. Rather than having one person be “the decider” and enforce others to follow her or his decision, this co-creative effect helps to keep the team on-board because like shuttle diplomacy, each stakeholder had input into the final decisions.
| Desirability (Marketing, Sales, UX) | Feasibility (Engineering, Development) | Viability (Product managers) | Total | |
|---|---|---|---|---|
Theme A | $50 | $25 | $20 | $95 |
Theme B | $25 | $75 | $60 | $160 |
Theme C | $25 | $0 | $20 | $45 |
Software Applications
While co-creation workshops and shuttle diplomacy are the most common ways of achieving alignment, a number of teams use various software applications to help them do so. With distributed teams becoming more and more common, remote teams may not be able to engage in the classic face-to-face shuttle diplomacy or in-person co-creation workshops. While videoconferencing has improved remote communication, additional software products can go even further toward aligning teams. Some are specific product roadmapping tools, such as ProdPad, Roadmunk, Aha!, and ProductPlan, while others are communication and tracking tools such as JIRA, Slack, Google Docs, Asana, and Trello, among others.
“One of the significant areas we wanted to address was to ensure the work we were doing aligned with our larger goals and strategies. Our company used JIRA as our project tracking tool. It is a highly configurable system, so we were able to manipulate it to monitor our work across teams. While configurability can be a value, it can also be a curse so it was important to keep it as simple as possible.
We created a ticket type which contained the high level requirements of the problem statement to capture the details of our objectives. We also created a new scrum board in Jira which allowed us prioritize our objectives in quarter based sprints to connect our strategy roadmap with the work for the engineering team. Each ticket was a dynamic version of a problem statement so as we continued to identify key learnings we were able to evolve our problem statement effectively around a what we were trying to measure, the measure of success, the impact of what we were doing and our expected return.
One key factor was a representative cross functional team that met weekly to bring in the perspectives of our Agile coaches, engineering leads, product managers, UX, and PMO team to ensure alignment, efficiency, and clarity.
In general, this approach gave us a dynamic view into what was being defined and delivered. I think that was a really important aspect of this cross-functional team. Roadmaps come in a variety of shapes and sizes, and separately each product manager had their own independent roadmaps. We needed a way to bring them all together in a single place where we could better understand the priorities to achieve our end-of-year goals, our longer term goals, and how we need to break that down into what we were doing right now to get there.”
Vanessa Ferranto, former Product Manager at Zipcar
By meeting weekly, the cross-functional Zipcar team raises issues, agrees on topics, and prioritizes/reprioritizes as necessary. They use JIRA to make inputs and track their progress. Thanks to this combination of recurring meetings and software applications, the team is able to tag, track, manage, and ultimately align on the product themes. This weekly meeting makes minor course corrections to a larger meeting that occurs quarterly, where decisions that have greater consequences may occur.
We spoke to several other teams and heard similar stories. Sameena Velshi, a product manager at Roadmunk, uses the company’s own product to help with this: “To no one’s surprise, we use Roadmunk. There’s a feature that allows you to roll up multiple roadmaps into one. This allows us to separate out what is specific to our department from the more company-wide vision.”
Velshi’s team receives updates through the platform and determines how to change course as needed, and the software helps teams to comment and approve or change the priorities on their roadmap. No team we spoke with relied solely on a software product for obtaining alignment, but the communication of information across a platform aided the buy-in process.
Summary
In this chapter, we covered some important concepts around alignment and buy-in. First, we clarified some definitions—namely, you learned that alignment, collaboration, and consensus are not the same thing. It’s crucial that you understand the differences between these terms and are aware of the downsides to consensus.
Next, we discussed three mechanisms to achieve alignment: shuttle diplomacy, co-creation workshops, and software applications.
Shuttle diplomacy involves meeting one-on-one with each stakeholder.
Co-creation workshops, by contrast, bring everyone together in a structured, intense session focused on alignment. Teams with a smaller group of stakeholders or fewer political agendas can choose to skip the one-on-ones of shuttle diplomacy in favor of moving right to the co-creation workshop.
Finally, software applications such as JIRA, Roadmunk, ProdPad, AHA, and ProductPlan can help with digitally tracking and obtaining buy-in from stakeholders. Most often, however, some form of face-to-face meetings is necessary for teams to achieve alignment. One tip: don’t reconsider the decisions made unless there is significant new information. This keeps the teams working to activate and execute on the decisions agreed upon.
At the end of the day (or should we say, beginning of the quarter), no matter which of these approaches you use—shuttle diplomacy, co-creation workshops, and/or software applications—you’ll need to get your team and/or organization aligned on the direction your product is going. Once you’ve done that, you’re ready to formalize, publish, and distribute your roadmap. Chapter 9 will cover tips and techniques for sharing your roadmap within your organization, presenting it to stakeholders, and revising it to incorporate the feedback you receive.