AMA: Adobe Senior Director of Product Management, 3D Category, Nicolas Liatti on Influencing the C-Suite

First it's critical to identify clearly who are the stakeholders. Usually business, engineering and design are the 3 you should work with very closely. Then you need to create meaningful relationships with them, so that they can really do their job of stakeholders as well. It's important to realize that being a stakeholder comes with a lot of responsibilities as well towards the team: stakeholders need to show up at the product discussions, provide feedback, etc.. Looking at who shows up or not is a good way to figure out which stakeholders are really playing their role and should be prioritized to have an impact on the product, or not.

Early in your career the only person you need to influence for getting promoted is usually your manager. As you grow and try to reach the C-Suite, there is not 1 single person to influence. What matters is the impact you are making. And in order to make impact at the company level, you need to influence and get aligned with a lot of different people from other orgs such as marketing, sales, etc. It's by influencing indirectly all those people that you will achieve impact and gain momentum.

The first question is why would you want to have exposure to the C-Suite? We often think that getting exposure will help our career, but that's not really true. What will help is making impact, and having this impact being exposed to the C-Suite. This is managers job to make this happen, so if you are a junior PM I would say ask directly your manager to help you manage up the impact you are having.

First it's critical to identify clearly who are the stakeholders, and what they need to know. Then create relationships with them and work with them differently, as they all have different needs. The worst would be to treat all of them in the same way, because you end up having no relationship at all with any of them. In the end, great product managers create great relationship with stakeholders.

The biggest mistake is to think that the C-Suite will listen to you because you have a super idea. If you want to influence the C-Suite, you need to influence all the functions below and demonstrate impact. There is usually no silver bullet, and it takes years to make this happen.

Before asking for more resources, you should wonder if you really need it? Usually we think we believe that with more resources we will achieve more, but I truly believe that we achieve better outcome when we have more constraints. You don't always need more resources, most of the time you just need to have the right resources. In my experience I had way better products created by teams of 5-6 people that were really focused, rather than teams of dizains of people. So before asking for more resources, the first question is do you really need them?

I don't think there is a simple answer for this one, as each situation will be different. But first I would say if you see misalignment between them then bring them together in a room, and have them acknowledge the misalignment. Making this visible will help you to move forward for escalation up to the person who can take a decision.