Bruce McCarthy is a renowned product leader at Product Culture, the organization he founded in 2018. He’s also the author of two books: Aligned (2024) and Product Roadmaps Relaunched (2018). Bruce sat down with the Product Momentum team for an in-person chat on the heels of his INDUSTRY Global keynote; our conversation focused on –

• Treating stakeholders as cutomers,

• Understanding/prioritizing stakeholder needs, and

• Bruce’s Stakeholder Canvas, a tool that helps product leaders with stakeholder alignment and prioritization challenges

The bottom line is this: stakeholders are not just peripheral figures in the product development ecosystem, but are central customers whose needs must be meticulously considered in the product manager’s decision-making process.
 
Stakeholders as Customers
One of the refreshing perspectives Bruce brought to the conversation was the idea of viewing stakeholders as customers. As he explained, “A stakeholder is anybody in your organization whose help and support you need in order for your product…to be successful. [I]t has to be marketed and sold and supported. It has to be financed.”
 
Think of stakeholders as your extended team who have a stake in the success of your product. In that respect, he adds, “Stakeholders are actually your customers too.”
 
The Toughest Job in Product: Prioritizing Stakeholder Needs
Product managers learn quickly that they can’t balance stakeholder needs perfectly, ever. “It’s always an art,” Bruce explains. “It’s always a work in progress. It’s always saying ‘no’ to some things in order to say ‘yes’ to other things.”
 
And that’s why it’s the hardest job in Product. The success of your product hinges on the identification and prioritization of competing stakeholder incentives. To be successful, product managers need to recognize the diversity of interests and influences that various stakeholders bring to the table.
 
The Stakeholder Canvas
Using the company org chart is one way to help prioritize stakeholder needs, but sometimes (often?), Bruce explains, it can be misleading. It doesn’t always indicate who has the decisionmaker’s ear. You might think it’s the CEO or Head of Product…only to find out for this project, it’s actually the CFO or the Head of Engineering. “The question then becomes, ‘what do you use instead?’”
 
As Bruce explains, “We developed the stakeholder canvas to help you map out your stakeholders, make a list of who they are, and capture all the information that you have about them: what they care about and what they need from you – which is just as important as what you need from them.”
“The stakeholder canvas helps you bring clarity to stakeholder alignment and make prioritization more manageable,” Bruce concluded.

Be sure to catch the whole conversation with Bruce McCarthy to learn about all the other tools he applied to this challenge, including the DiSC® framework and the DACI and RACI decisionmaking tools.

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Sean Murray [00:00:09] Hi everyone. I’m Sean Murray.

Sean Flaherty [00:00:10] And I’m Sean Flaherty.

Sean Murray [00:00:12] Welcome back to Product Momentum. A community of product people and a marketplace of ideas where leaders and learners come together to shape our way ahead.

Sean Flaherty [00:00:20] Our production team is the best in the industry, and we are dedicated to producing high quality content from thought leaders across the product development space.

Sean Murray [00:00:28] Check us out on your favorite listening platform or if you prefer the video experience. You can find all our latest episodes on the Product Momentum YouTube channel.

Sean Flaherty [00:00:37] Let’s get after it.

Sean Flaherty [00:00:48] Sean, that was a great episode with Bruce McCarthy. We’re here at Industry. He gave a great talk today, and he came over here and we had a really, really good conversation with them about alignment, which is the title of his book Aligned.

Sean Murray [00:00:59] Yeah, he really focused on stakeholders. The whole conversation was about stakeholders and why they’re super important, how stakeholders are actually your customer. Right. And I think it was a refreshing topic because we talk a lot about users and this is an opportunity to really for us to explore another segment. You know, the product people really have to be aware of when we’re making decisions.

Sean Flaherty [00:01:18] Yeah. He introduced some tools like his stakeholder canvas and some of the other like challenges that we often have with prioritization when dealing with a bunch of different stakeholders. So it’s a great episode. So let’s get after it. Let’s do it. All right.

Sean Murray [00:01:32] All right. We are here. Serial entrepreneur and leader of product teams Bruce McCarthy. Right. Bruce founded Product Culture in 2018, helping product team succeed through skill building, coaching and organizational design. It’s also a throwback because Bruce was on episode 30 of the Product Momentum podcast. So we are like on a flight and now we’re back.

Bruce McCarthy [00:01:55] We’re glad to be.

Sean Flaherty [00:01:56] Here running back.

Sean Murray [00:01:56] Really. We’re really bringing it back. So Bruce spoke here at Industry. Rocked the house yesterday and he really spoke a lot about stakeholders. So we want to just start off with a really blanket question like, what is a stakeholder?

Bruce McCarthy [00:02:10] Well, the way I think about it is a stakeholder is anybody in your organization who’s whose help and support you need in order for your product, your project, your initiative, your feature, whatever it is to be successful? Okay. So obviously, that includes people who are directly on your team, on your squad, engineers, designers, maybe a data scientist, but crucially, it includes people from all parts of the company. If your product is going to be successful, it has to be marketed and sold and supported. It has to be financed. I think of stakeholders as your extended team or your broader cross-functional team across the whole organization of people who you need for it to be successful, who they have a stake in the success of your product, and you have a stake in getting them on board.

Sean Flaherty [00:03:05] Yeah, it requires a lot of this requires a lot of empathy, right? Because they all have different incentives. That’s right. But you all want the product to be successful or you wouldn’t be in the game. But individually, they have different incentives.

Bruce McCarthy [00:03:15] This is the hardest part about the product job, I think, is that you have to wrangle all of these people with all these contradictory incentives. Salespeople need to make their numbers this quarter. The support team doesn’t want unsupportable customers. The customer success team doesn’t want churn. So those things are already fighting with each other, right? You want we want growth, but at a sustainable pace. The sales team wants stuff on the roadmap that will drive deal closings this month. But the engineering team doesn’t want a death march to ship those features and then fix everything that went wrong because they did it too fast.

Sean Flaherty [00:03:58] Yeah, they rushed.

Bruce McCarthy [00:03:59] Right. So you’re in the middle trying to balance all of these concerns. Yeah, right. And you can’t balance them perfectly ever. It’s always an art. It’s always a work in progress. It’s always saying no to some things in order to say yes to other things.

Sean Flaherty [00:04:18] Prioritization. The fight of prioritization. What gets what what are you going to give up to get this thing right?

Bruce McCarthy [00:04:23] And my my whole thing that I talked about on stage yesterday is to bring all those stakeholders along with you on the journey. Don’t be the kind of product leader who says, all right, me and my team have cooked up this amazing plan in the lab and now we’re going to unleash it on the rest of the company and have them all kind of go, ‘Whoa, wait, What?

Sean Flaherty [00:04:45] How does that fit in? Right? Yeah. I can’t operate in silos, essentially what you’re saying.

Bruce McCarthy [00:04:49] Exactly. But on the other hand, if you bring all those people with contradictory goals and impulses and preferences along every step of the discovery process, the research process, the strategy development, the roadmap, development. It’s not your secret master plan anymore. It’s everybody’s. Yeah, everybody’s. And so even if you have to say we’re going to not do everything that you wanted because we need to do some of the things that you wanted, transparency, then you’re probably much more likely to go along with that because you were in those trade off discussions every day.

Sean Flaherty [00:05:28] Yeah. Yeah. And prioritization is an art. It’s an art form. I believe that. And it’s like one of the art forms that the product leaders have to master. Got to get better and better at it.

Bruce McCarthy [00:05:38] And it’s partly math. Sure. But the math was usually operating on guesswork.

Sean Flaherty [00:05:45] And sometimes on short term horizons versus long term horizons.

Bruce McCarthy [00:05:48] Right. Where incentives again differ. Yeah. Rich Mironov always talks about as a V.P. of product, throwing himself bodily in front of the VP of sales, who is on who is on the way to escalate to the CEO because he needs something on the roadmap right now to to close a deal. That’s that’s the tension we’re talking about. That’s the that’s the stakeholder management you have to engage in every day. Yeah.

Sean Murray [00:06:19] I thought this was a refreshing topic at this conference because there was a lot centered around users here, and this was like a whole different realm that we need to make sure that we’re also thinking about right. And that we’re empathetic towards. Right. Right. You had a couple of cool topics that were that were sneaky. So you talked about hidden stakeholders, things about the concept of hidden stakeholders.

Bruce McCarthy [00:06:37] Well, if you think about the the official org chart that you get when you arrive at the organization, you know, with the CEO at the top and all the lines in the boxes shows how everything cascades down through all the vice presidents and all the functions. That’s actually not very helpful in figuring out who you really need on that extended virtual team that I talked about. In fact, it can be misleading if you think, well, I have my boss in a chain up to the CEO and I have say, the head of engineering and the head of design bought in, that should be enough, right? But then you find out later that the CFO is really has quite a hand in deciding which teams get more headcount.

Sean Flaherty [00:07:24] Funding, right.

Bruce McCarthy [00:07:24] Right. Based on that person’s calculation of return on investment, or maybe the sales team has a huge influence on what’s going to…we were talking a moment ago, what’s going to get on the roadmap? You need to figure out in your organization? Is this a sales led company, marketing led, product led, maybe unlikely or finance led? That’s happened to me…before you can know who you really need on that team, whose support you really need. Who, if they were to whisper something in the CEO’s ear, would make or break the resources that you need or the the alignment that you need from the rest of the organization to support your thing. My favorite sort of hidden stakeholder is the one who’s almost not on the org chart. They have some vague title like partnerships or strategy or corp dev or something like that. Nobody reports to them and you don’t really know what they do. And that’s very deliberate because they are the advisor to the CEO. This is the CEO whisperer, sort of power player, you know, And you you need to know who that is and what they care about if you want to get the necessary support inside the organization. Yeah.

Sean Murray [00:08:47] And you have to build relationships inside your organization so you can find out like, hey, maybe this product manager down here actually plays pickup soccer with the CEO, Right? Right. And right. And there’s a different there’s a different level of influence there. Right.

Bruce McCarthy [00:09:00] And every company culture is different, but very often it helps to find those social connections or make some of your own, like be the sort of person who is happy to meet a few teammates at a coffee shop or for lunch outside the office. Or, Hey, why don’t we all go to the local pub after work as a group? And a lot of the most important conversations happen outside of a meeting with an agenda.

Sean Flaherty [00:09:34] In the in-between spaces. Yeah. When exactly? When you have an opportunity to have those collisions. Well, difficult in a remote work environment.

Bruce McCarthy [00:09:42] It is. These are sometimes called hallway conversations. Yeah. And some of the most important things happen between the meetings in the hallway or after or before work. So you got to find ways to make that happen, even if you’re not in the same location first. If you can do it, I would say find an excuse to be in the same location in person. Humans, we’re weird. We don’t think of other people as quite real if we’ve only seen them on TV, you know, or Zoom. So if you have a chance to actually meet someone in person, even just once, then you and they are much more real to each other. And it’s easier to talk and easier to come to an understanding.

Sean Flaherty [00:10:19] Form a connection.

Bruce McCarthy [00:10:19] Right? But even even when you can’t find informal channels of communication, don’t send a lengthy email that can be easily understood. Send a quick note on Slack. Hey, have you got a sec? And then get on video with them for just five minutes, even, just to be like, I just wanted you to know we’re going down this path and I need your input before we formalize it, before we announce anything. People will appreciate that that attempt at a personal connection. Yeah.

Sean Murray [00:10:51] And you have to be deliberate. So deliberately informal as, like, is what I was thinking of there. Right. But whenever you’re chatting with somebody on whatever messaging platform your company has bought into, right there is that video call button. There is like right in that face, right? It’s right.

Bruce McCarthy [00:11:06] There. Use that. People you might feel like, I don’t want to bother them. What if they’re in the middle of something? We’ll just send them a text first saying, Have you got a sec? Can we get on a call? Yeah. And maybe they don’t answer you immediately because they are in the middle of something. But half an hour later you’d be surprised. Melissa, my coauthor, right after a presentation by the CTO of her 5,000-person company, Wayfair, she slacked them and said, Hey, thanks for that. I have a question as a follow up. And he got back to her right away. You know, he said he referred her to somebody else, but he wasn’t mad at being interrupted.

Sean Flaherty [00:11:45] Yeah. So you introduced a tool in your talk, the Stakeholder Canvas. Talk about that a little bit. Explain it.

Bruce McCarthy [00:11:52] So if you can’t use the org chart, the obvious question is what do you use instead? And the stakeholder canvas is a concept we design for and introduced in the book, Aligned, to help you map out your stakeholders, to help you make a list and keep it organized and jot down all the information that you have about those stakeholders. What they care about, what they need from you, which is just as important as what you need from them. Yeah. And then we also have a bunch of frameworks that we describe in the book that are useful for guiding conversations with people. Like we use the we use the DiSC^® framework to describe how people like to make decisions. Some people are more directive, some people are more conscientious. They want the data. They some people are more influence oriented and they want to make sure everybody is everybody else is consulted. They want to know what the what the majority think. And so if you can figure out how other people like to make decisions, you can keep track of it in the stakeholder canvass and be reminded. I’m going to go talk to Sean. And Sean is a is really conscientious. I better bring the facts. Yeah.

Sean Flaherty [00:13:06] The they know what detail the C is. Right. See the detail.

Bruce McCarthy [00:13:10] You we also have organized the canvas into different decision making roles. So if I’m a product leader and my job is to say prioritize what the team is going to work on, yeah, then that’s my decision. I am the driver of that decision. In a framework we like called DACI, which is similar to RACI, but it’s specific to decision making. The driver is maybe me on that sort of thing, whereas the driver on how are we going to implement this is probably someone in engineering, but in the DACI framework there’s also people who are consulted … contributors and so your stakeholders would be your contributors. And then there’s also people who are.

Sean Flaherty [00:13:54] For the audiences. What does DACI stand for?

Bruce McCarthy [00:13:57] Driver and approver, that’s another role and contributor and informed.

Sean Flaherty [00:14:05] Informed. Okay.

Bruce McCarthy [00:14:06] So in addition to you being the driver, you probably have someone higher up in the organization, maybe not your direct supervisor, but somebody who you need to align with on any decision you’re going to make. You own the decision. It’s been delegated to you, but you agree on criteria with your approvers so that 99 times out of 100, it’s going to be rubber stamped.

Sean Flaherty [00:14:26] Yeah, right. You’ve established the priority stack that they’re on to live with.

Sean Murray [00:14:32] Sean has a framework that he calls the relationship ladder, where you move from trust to loyalty to advocacy. And it’s almost are you thinking about applying that to.

Sean Flaherty [00:14:41] Internally.

Sean Murray [00:14:42] Your all your stakeholder canvas because that way you get to understand your level of relationship with them.

Bruce McCarthy [00:14:46] We I think that actually I really like that maybe we could write a blog together

Sean Flaherty [00:14:54] Blog, right? Yeah, I would love that. Yeah.

Bruce McCarthy [00:14:56] In addition, we also describe how aligned versus influential someone is within the organization aligned with your supporting your initiative, product feature, whatever you’re working on, plus how influential they are in the people who are highly aligned and highly influential are your allies who will influence on your behalf and the people at the other end of the spectrum in terms of alignment, are your spoilers where they they have a lot of power and they’re not aligned.

Sean Flaherty [00:15:25] So we’re going in the other direction potentially.

Bruce McCarthy [00:15:27] Exactly.

Sean Flaherty [00:15:27] Demotivated, the social scientists would call it. Right, moving in the wrong direction.

Bruce McCarthy [00:15:31] And you have to you have to make sure those people are on your canvas, too, and that you make an effort to influence them.

Sean Flaherty [00:15:37] That’s excellent. So when you think about the stakeholder canvas, you have all these stakeholders. We know this. There’s clearly a dominance hierarchy to which one should be the most important stakeholders, like which perspectives or concerns should should be at the top of that stack rank. Talk about that a little bit.

Bruce McCarthy [00:15:52] Well, and again, the org chart is only a very, very approximate kind of poor indicator of real power. I’ve worked in organizations where the CFO was really more influential and powerful than the CEO or the VP of this versus the VP of that. They influence disproportionately across the organization. You have to kind of read behind the org chart and into the matrix and figure out what’s going on there. Some clues are who does the CEO have coffee with just because they are chatting? Right? That’s a clue of a power player or who attends meetings that they’re not invited to just to listen in or who does. If the CEO or some other very senior power players’ door is closed, who’s probably in there with them? They have the confidential conversations that aren’t shared broadly.

Sean Flaherty [00:16:47] You know, I have this this belief that you heard of the hippo, of course, highest paid person in the organization. Yeah. That when you’re building a product. There is a dominance hierarchy of what concerns are important. And I’ve always believed it’s got to be the consumers, the user of the product that’s at the top of stack rank. And an obvious dysfunction occurs when you don’t put the user at the forefront. Yep. And you’re taking orders from the hippo or the rhino, which is like an influencer in the sales organization. The really high, you know, new value opportunity that comes in. Right. And you’re you’re dysfunction. You’re creating dysfunction in the team because you’re you’re confusing you’re confusing the team about what’s important. And at the end of the day, the number one concern is to make the user happy.

Bruce McCarthy [00:17:29] Yeah, I agree.

Sean Flaherty [00:17:30] Like, you got to you got to turn the user into what we call an advocate.

Bruce McCarthy [00:17:33] So the way I think about it is in order to satisfy the customer. Yeah. Which is the only way ultimately to be successful, always you have to have product market fit, right? Yeah. Well, in order to successfully.

Sean Flaherty [00:17:48] Get that product out there…

Bruce McCarthy [00:17:49] Sell and market and finance and support your product, you also have to have product organization fit.

Sean Flaherty [00:17:55] Yep.

Bruce McCarthy [00:17:55] So if you think of your stakeholders as a special type of customer.

Sean Flaherty [00:18:00] And they are.

Bruce McCarthy [00:18:01] I think that’s yeah, that’s where we can bring all of our product management skills to bear. We can do a discovery interview. We can do some user testing. We can have a customer advisory board. Yeah, right. These are all things that we know how to do as product managers. Turn that switch in your head that says, okay, stakeholders are not a necessary evil. They are part of the solution.

Sean Flaherty [00:18:27] And they’re actually necessary to be successful. Right? So if you start to think of them as a barrier or an evil, you’re already setting yourself up for some dysfunction and pain.

Bruce McCarthy [00:18:38] I don’t think that’s politics. I think that’s that’s bringing people onto the team. Yeah. And managing recognizing that your team isn’t just like 5 or 6 people on your squad. It’s actually a.

Sean Flaherty [00:18:48] Whole ecosystem, right? Yeah. I love that.

Bruce McCarthy [00:18:51] Right.

Sean Murray [00:18:51] Awesome. Hey, towards the end of our talks, we always try to understand, like, what you’re reading right now. So what’s on your bookshelf or what’s like up next for you to read?

Bruce McCarthy [00:19:02] I am reading two books right now. One is a product book. It’s Jeff Gothelf and Josh Seiden’s new book on OKRs of Who Does What by how much. Which is excellent. Very easy to consume, very concrete and specific in what can be a kind of a fuzzy world, the OKRs. Right. So I, I do recommend that. And the other one I’m reading is a book about the evolution of human language, and it traces back archeology and DNA and tools and art generated by early humans and almost humans back millions of years.

Sean Flaherty [00:19:46] You know, the author is that book.

Bruce McCarthy [00:19:48] I can look it up.

Sean Flaherty [00:19:48] Yeah, well, we’ll put it in the blog post or on the right Sounds right up Sean’s alley. Options that I’m going to read that. Yeah that stuff it’s.

Bruce McCarthy [00:19:56] It’s there’s there’s some speculation there’s some leaps of imagination involved because we’re piecing together things that.

Sean Flaherty [00:20:04] Don’t aren’t clues.

Bruce McCarthy [00:20:05] We don’t have 100% data. Right. Nobody was there who’s can tell us what happened. Yeah. But it is compelling and I, I think product people should, in addition to reading shop books like how to do OKRs right. Yeah, I think we should be reading anything and everything that we can about.

Sean Flaherty [00:20:25] People.

Bruce McCarthy [00:20:25] About people. About the science of people. Yeah. To understand our customers, our users, our buyers and the people we work with every day.

Sean Flaherty [00:20:34] I will always say product leadership’s an exercise in anthropology in a very fixed domain. No, absolutely right. We’ve got all these stakeholders. They’re people. They’re smart, they got money. They invest in your your team. Your team is a bunch of smart people. And we’re trying to produce these things in the world that people are going to use. And it’s people that determine whether or not we’re successful. It’s like all people.

Bruce McCarthy [00:20:55] There was a conversation on stage a few minutes ago where somebody was saying, okay, different people own different decisions. Engineering owns technical decisions, product owns priorities and design, owns design decisions. And I think that is. Yes, but that’s a bit reductive. Sure. Those decisions have to come together and all three of those disciplines and more are involved in most of those decisions, at least informally. If you’re going to make a technical decision, there are inherent tradeoffs for the design and the experience and the performance of the product in a technical decision, and product and design need to be part of that, not because they’re making the technical decision, but because they need to articulate, understand the tradeoffs and have an influence on that decision.

Sean Flaherty [00:21:46] Outstanding. Bruce, how do you define innovation?

Bruce McCarthy [00:21:48] Innovation is about creating value; it is about making it possible. For people to do things better, faster, easier, cheaper, whatever. Right. Right. Is it’s it’s about actually, I think the best innovations are about not just delivering value, but about giving people tools to deliver value. That’s that’s why I think AI is actually an innovation and a good one. People worry that it’ll replace their jobs. I don’t think that. I think it’s like every other tool that’s been invented.

Sean Flaherty [00:22:24] It’s about people learning to use the tools of the ones that are going to replace your job. Right, Exactly. Awesome. Well, thank you for joining us. It’s been a great conversation. Your talk was amazing and Aligned is the book. Yep. Which is what we do is as product leaders, we align people and highly encourage you to go out and get his book.

Bruce McCarthy [00:22:40] Readings available on Amazon.

Sean Flaherty [00:22:42] Outstanding.

Sean Murray [00:22:43] Awesome. Thanks, Bruce.

Bruce McCarthy [00:22:44] Thank you.