AMA: Oracle Director of Product Management, OCI, Devika Nair on Stakeholder Management

Product Management primarily partners with engineering. They are responsible for what we build, and why we built it. Product Marketing is responsibile for how we position these products to the customers. While product management is also responsible for the positioning, they are looking at it as part of the vision and decision making.

It is important to align your requests to the goals of the team you are partnering with. From that perspective, you need to align your approach to stakeholder management. For example, your design leadership might be more interested in the long-term vision of your product while sales is interested in how much customer demand your product is likely to generate.

I have PMs who work on both horizontal objectives across the organization (e.g., observability, security across all products) and responsible for certain product verticals (e.g., the product/feature we sell). Most of my 10 member team is responsible for solving a customer problem through their product vertical. I have one PM responsible for a horizontal objective, though each of the others are also responsible for certain horizontals. Success is measured both in terms of the quarterly goals they set and the impact on the organization

1) See if its truly inversely correlated in all dimensions. It is likely there are some dimensions (e.g., customer hapiness) on which you have similar objectives. 2) See if you have common objective in the long term. For example, if you are working on a feature that will reduce the usage of your product, your long term objective is still likely to get increased usage. If the above still doesn't work, align on common organizational objectives. 

It is best to align your success measures with that of your organization. Identify the KPIs and goals of your organization and team and look at how you can contribute towards the same. Use this to frame your success measures and performance indicators. Over time, they evolve with your scope. I also like to have separate measure of personal success, which can include learning goals, impact goals, etc.

That is a hard one to answer because there is no one-size-fits-all. There could be launches where the product rarely evolves and checking in with stakeholders once in a few months might suffice, at other times it could be daily or even multiple times a day. You would also want to increase the check-ins as you get closer to milestones (e.g., finishing user experience, go-to-market, etc). For a lot of products, a milestone based checkin works best. A weekly status update can supplement it.