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If you have worked on a large engineering product, the odds are that you did not build it in isolation but in collaboration with colleagues from diverse domains. It’s common for software projects to involve product, business, marketing, design, analytics, customer support, end-users, and C-suite leaders. All of these people with a vested interest in the success of your product represent your stakeholders.
The tech industry is littered with numerous failed products from Amazon’s Fire phone to Google+. One of the common recurring reasons is poor stakeholder management and coordination. Knowing who your stakeholders are, understanding their incentives and priorities, aligning their interests, getting buy-in, and leveraging their expertise is critical for the success of your product. Just one of the stakeholders being misaligned makes developing your product much harder, so it is imperative that you manage stakeholders from the conception to the launch of your product. I have seen several products fail due to poor planning and management of stakeholders. In this article, I will provide some insights on effectively managing your stakeholders as an engineering leader. Identifying Your Stakeholders The first step is to identify the stakeholders that are critical to the success of your product, understand their motivation and priorities, and their relative importance and influence. Successful stakeholder management starts by mapping your stakeholders across several dimensions, including:
A stakeholder mapping exercise will help you identify the most important stakeholders during each phase of the product development lifecycle. This helps you later as you develop optimal strategies to balance the diverse perspectives of each stakeholder, manage any inevitable conflicts, and build unique communication methods for each one. An important point that many articles on this topic omit is that stakeholder mapping is not static. It must be modified as individual stakeholders are replaced or reallocated to the project. For instance, if your VP of Product is replaced by a new one, the mapping has to be redrawn based on your new VP’s motivations and priorities. These will almost certainly affect your roadmap for any products under development. Prioritizing Your Stakeholders Every stakeholder contributes unique expertise that is pivotal for your product’s success, but their relative interest, importance, influence, and level of contribution varies across the product lifecycle. Using your stakeholder map, identify the most important stakeholders and engage them accordingly. Remember that CXOs aren’t necessarily the most important stakeholders at every stage of a product’s development. For instance, while C-level business leaders are crucial for providing initial budget and sign-off, during the development phase, your product and design stakeholders are often more relevant. Furthermore, if you lose touch with the end-users during the development phase, you might end up building a product missing features that customers want. I saw this recently when another engineering team started a new project. After getting initial buy-in from leadership and validating the customers’ needs, the manager was replaced. Instead of re-assessing the team’s priorities and confirming stakeholder alignment, the team got out of sync with the deliverables that customers needed. At the end of a year-long development cycle, they launched the product, but customers were no longer bought in. The team essentially lost a year’s worth of effort because they didn’t keep all the relevant stakeholders in mind throughout the development process. Aligning Stakeholders While stakeholder mapping is a necessary first step, conflicting priorities amongst stakeholders are common and need to be resolved delicately. You can preempt certain stakeholder conflicts by keeping conflicting interests in mind. Achieving multi-stakeholder alignment requires carefully planned discussions and negotiations to assess the lay of the land with each stakeholder. Focused group meetings prioritizing key points of disagreement or conflicting priorities can help you achieve alignment and avoid conflicts down the line. Additionally, knowing which stakeholders are most likely to back your project through challenging times and which are likely to abandon you is important. Learn when to fight fires on your own and when to seek out more experienced mentors in your company to provide a different perspective. The strategy for stakeholder alignment works differently in small startups than it does in large, multi-layered organizations. In a startup, speed of execution is critical while enterprise teams may have many layers of bureaucracy impeding velocity. Both have their challenges, but it’s important not to treat them the same. Keeping Stakeholders Up to Date After getting all the stakeholders aligned, you need a communication strategy to share updates on the project at set intervals. Tailor your communication plan according to the importance, expertise, and priorities of each stakeholder. For example, the project’s contributors might need a high-touch approach, while executives might just want periodic updates and high-level presentations. There are several appropriate modes of communication apart from 1:1 meetings, especially now that so many teams are remote. At a minimum, you should maintain a project status board detailing the progress of each milestone, KPI, team member, and estimated timeline. Popular software and tools that facilitate structured project management include: While a project board might be enough for some stakeholders, others may want more explicit communication. As an engineering leader, be proactive about this communication, leveraging video conferencing and messaging tools to help keep stakeholders in the loop. Finally, group status updates can be productive when addressing stakeholders who are too busy to read or watch pre-recorded videos. These meetings are especially helpful if you need signoff from several parties to proceed. Engaging Stakeholders and Taking Feedback During the execution phase of the project, continuous engagement and clear communication with your stakeholders is essential to maintain their interest and trust. Stakeholders are often involved in a multitude of projects, and your project may not be their top priority. While giving stakeholders regular updates can help, it’s also helpful to get their buy-in or actively involve them in some parts of the project. As long as the key stakeholders are satisfied, there is less likelihood of difficult surprises down the road. Often, stakeholders will express disappointment or frustration with your team’s work, rate of progress, or specific decisions related to product development. Feedback - both positive and negative - helps your team apprise their project status and course-correct accordingly, so first, evaluate the feedback to understand whether it’s valid or a simple miscommunication. Leveraging your objective analysis will enable you to respond to the stakeholders’ concerns accordingly and manage their expectations better in the future. Whenever situations like this arise, follow up by bringing these stakeholders into decisions earlier and ensuring they have the information they need to suggest changes earlier. Finally, use feedback as an opportunity to understand what contributes to stakeholder satisfaction with the project. There might be a new process you can implement to avoid similar misunderstandings on future projects. Developing Your Stakeholder Management Skills For new engineering leaders, the art of stakeholder management might take some time to master. If you feel like you’re struggling with it, find mentors (typically senior engineering leaders in your organization) and look into external professional training. Successful stakeholder management requires a host of soft skills, including communication, empathy, and persuasiveness. “You need to be able to communicate and collaborate with other engineers who are working on different pieces of that system, as well as cross-functionally with product managers, designers, and others who are contributing to the design of the system that you’ll help implement.” - David Kaminsky, Senior Engineering Manager at StubHub While some technical experts might dismiss the relevance of these skills when they’re in individual contributor roles, in my experience, the most successful engineering leaders combine strong technical acumen with excellent interpersonal skills. Conclusion The success of your software or engineering product depends on your ability to successfully collaborate with and manage cross-functional stakeholders across the entire product development lifecycle. Identifying your key stakeholders and understanding their priorities lays the foundation for achieving strong cross-functional stakeholder alignment. This foundation can be further cemented with smart communication strategies and tools to keep your stakeholders abreast of the progress and vested in the success of your product. Stakeholder management is not a new topic, but no two managers do it the same way. You have to incorporate your context, industry, and strengths to find a set of practices that work for you.
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Strong engineering talent is the bedrock of modern technology companies. Software engineers, in particular, are in high demand given their expertise and skills. At the same time, there is a much greater supply of software companies and startups, all of which are jostling to hire top engineers. Given this market reality, retention of top engineering talent is imperative for a company to grow and innovate in the short as well as the long term.
Retaining employees is critical for numerous reasons. It helps a company retain experience not only in terms of employees’ domain expertise and skills, but also organizational knowledge of products, processes, people, and culture. Strong employee retention rates (>90%) ensure a long-term foundation for success and enhances team morale as well as trust in the company. A stable engineering team is in a better position to both build and ship innovative products and establish a reputation in the market that helps attract top-quality talent. The corporate incentive of maintaining high standards of employee hiring and retention is also related to the costs of employee churn. Turnover costs companies in the US $1 trillion USD a year with an annual turnover rate of more than twenty-six percent. The cost of replacing talent is often as high as two times their annual salary. This is a tremendous expense that can be averted through better company policies and culture. The onus is typically on the human resources (HR) team to develop more employee-friendly practices and promote higher engagement and work–life balance. However, in practice, most HR teams are deferential to the company leadership and that is where the buck stops. Leaders and managers have a fundamental responsibility to retain the employees on their team, as more often than not, employees do not leave the company per se, but the line manager. I will discuss best practices and strategies to improve retention, which ought to be a consistent effort across the entire employee lifecycle--from recruiting to onboarding through regular milestones during an employee’s tenure. Start at the Start More often than not, managers do not invest in onboarding preparation and processes out of laziness and indifference. Good employee retention practice starts at the very beginning, i.e., at the time of hiring. Hiring talent through a structured, transparent, fair, and meritocratic interviewing process that allows the candidate to understand their particular role and responsibilities, the company’s diversity and inclusion practices, and the larger mission of the company sets an important tone for future employees. Hiring the right people who are a good culture fit increases the likelihood of greater engagement and longer tenure at the company. Hiring managers should not hire for the sake of hiring. They should put considerable thought into each new hire and how that hire might fit in on their team. Apart from hiring, managers have other important considerations, including:
In the first few months, the new hires, the hiring team, and company are in a “dating” phase, evaluating each other and gathering evidence on whether to commit to a longer-term relationship. Most new employees make up their mind to stay or leave within the first six months. A third of new hires who quit said they had barely any onboarding or none at all. The importance of a new employee’s first impressions on the joining date, the first week, the first month, and the first quarter cannot be overemphasized. Great onboarding starts before the new hire’s join date, ensuring all necessary preparation is handled, like paperwork. Orientation programs on the join day are essential to introduce the company and expand on its mission, values, and culture beyond what the employee might have learned during the interviews. Minor things like having the team know in advance about a new team member’s join date, and readying the desk, equipment, access, and logins are tell-tale signs of how much thought and effort the hiring team has invested in onboarding. Fellow teammates also make a significant impact, whether they are welcoming and drop in to say “hi” or stop by for a quick chat to get to know the hire better, or take the new employee out for lunch with the whole team. Onboarding should not end on day one but continue in various forms. Some examples include:
A successful onboarding strategy should enable the employee to know their first project, the expectations, associated milestones, and how performance evaluation works. Keep It Up! Onboarding should be followed up with regular check-ins by the manager and HR at the one-month, three-month, and six-month mark. These meetings should be treated as an opportunity for the company to assess the new employee’s comfort level on the team and provide feedback as needed. An onboarding mentor or buddy, if not assigned already, should be provided to help the employee find their feet and learn the informal culture and practices. The manager should set up the employee for success by providing low-hanging projects that are quick to deliver and help the new hire understand the process of building and deploying a new feature using the company’s internal engineering tools and systems. With quick wins, new hires are able to build trust within the organization and gain more confidence to do excellent work. As time goes on, the role of the hiring manager becomes more prominent in coordinating regular 1-on-1 meetings, providing the new hire clear work guidelines, as well as challenging and stimulating projects. Apart from work, an introduction to the organizational setup and culture, as well as social interaction within and beyond the team is also crucial. As the new employee ramps up, it is important to give constructive feedback so that the employee can improve. Where a new employee delivers positive impact in the early days itself, the manager should highlight their work within the team and organization, and motivate the employee to continue to perform well. In addition to core engineering work, employees feel more connected when a company actively invests in their learning and development. Cross-functional training programs that involve employees across different teams foster deeper collaboration and a stronger sense of connection within the various parts of the company. Investment in employees’ upskilling and education via partnership with external learning platforms or vendors also generates a positive culture of instilling curiosity and learning. Learning new skills energizes the employees and provides them opportunities to grow and develop. They can then apply the newly learned knowledge and skills to pertinent business problems. It creates a virtuous culture that yields overall positive outcomes for the employee and employer alike, and positively influences the long-term retention rates. New employees generally feel the need to be positively engaged. A powerful mission statement can sometimes convert naysayers faster and generate a company-wide sense of being part of something impactful. This fosters deeper engagement, loyalty, and trust in the company and helps employees embrace company values, resulting in better employee retention rates. Frequent town hall meetings from the leadership enable a new hire to understand the organization as a coherent whole and their particular role in furthering the company’s mission. Listen to Feedback The diverse organizational efforts to onboard, engage, and enhance new employees’ perception of the company are bound to fail if the organization does not seek and act on any feedback shared by the new hires. Companies ought to create an internal culture of open communication whereby they seek feedback from employees via surveys, meetings, and town halls, and showcase transparent efforts in implementing employees’ suggestions and feedback. Regular 1-on-1 meetings with managers should be treated as an opportunity to gather feedback and offer the employee insights into whether and how the company is taking action on that feedback. However, in spite of organizational efforts to improve employee satisfaction and wellbeing, some attrition is inevitable. Attrition rates of more than ten percent is a cause for concern, however, especially when top-performing employees leave the company. Exit interviews are typically conducted by HR and hiring managers, but in practice these are largely farcical as the employees hardly share their honest opinions and have lost trust that the company can take care of their career interests and development. Companies can implement processes that bring greater transparency around employee decisions related to hiring, promotion, and exit. These processes will also hold HR and managers to greater accountability with respect to employee churn, and incentivize them to increase the retention rates in their teams. In past generations, job stability was a paramount aspiration for employees which meant they typically spent all their working lives at the same company. In today’s world, with a plethora of enterprises and new startups, high-performing talent is in greater demand and it is possible to accelerate one’s career growth by frequently job hopping and switching companies. Nowadays, feedback about company processes, culture, compensation, interviews, and so on, is available on a plethora of public platforms including Glassdoor and LinkedIn. Companies are now more proactive in managing their online reputation and act on feedback from the anonymous reviews on such platforms. Conclusion Employees in the post-Covid remote-working world are prone to greater degrees of stress, mental health issues, and burnout, all of which have adverse impacts on their work–life balance. In such extraordinary times, companies face the unique challenge—and opportunity—to develop and promote better employee welfare practices. At one end of the spectrum, there are companies like Amazon. In 2015, The New York Times famously portrayed the company as a “bruising workplace.” Then, in 2021, The New York Times again reported on Amazon for poor workplace practices and systems, prompting a public acknowledgment from the CEO that Amazon needs to do a better job. On the other end of the spectrum, there are companies like Atlassian or Spotify that have made proactive changes in their organizational culture and are being lauded for new practices to promote employee welfare during the pandemic. Companies that adapt to the changing times and demonstrate that they genuinely care for their employees will enjoy better retention rates, lower costs due to frequent rehiring, and long-term employee trust that conveys the company as a beacon of progressive workplace culture and employment practices. Published by Colabra Preview:
Effective communication skills are pivotal to success in science. From maximizing productivity at work through efficient teamwork and collaboration to preventing the spread of misinformation during global pandemics like Covid19, the importance of strong communication skills cannot be emphasized enough. However, scientists often struggle to communicate their work clearly for various reasons. Firstly, most academic institutes do not prioritize training scientists in essential soft skills like communication. With negligible organizational or departmental training and little to no feedback from professors and peers, scientists fail to fully appreciate the real-world importance and consequences of poor communication skills. The long scientific training period in the academic ivory tower is spent conversing with fellow scientists, with minimal interaction with non-technical professionals and the general public. Thus, the lingua franca among scientists is predominantly interspersed with jargon, leading to poor communication with non-scientists. This article will describe best practices and frameworks for professional scientists and non-scientists in commercial scientific enterprises to communicate effectively. 👉 Here is the full article Published by StatusHero Preview:
Teams are the building blocks of successful organizations. The success of modern technology companies is driven to a large extent by their engineering and product teams. It is crucial for new engineering and product team leaders to maximize the productivity of their respective teams while ensuring a strong sense of team spirit, motivation, and alignment to the larger mission of the company, as well as fostering an inclusive and open culture that is collaborative, meritocratic, and respectful of each team member. Effective team development and management is therefore critical for engineering and product leaders, and ensuring robust team development at scale remains a big challenge in the face of changing work conditions. Despite the importance of team building and development, not many leaders are trained to succeed and hone their leadership skills. In many cases, individual contributors who progress or transition to the managerial track may not have the aptitude for developing teams nor have the necessary experience or training in this vital aspect of their new role. Although team development is more an art than a science, this topic has received significant interest from the industry as well as academia, leading to structured team development theories and strategies. In this article, you’ll explore a list of curated tips for engineering and product leaders to better manage the development of your teams and accelerate your learning journey on the leadership track. This particular set of tips focuses on building team cohesion, facilitating the five stages of team development, and providing structures for effective teamwork and communication that foster an open and collaborative team culture. 👉 Here is the full article |
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