Well that escalated quickly

Back in November, during one of my Product Mastery Pathway modules with a group of enthusiastic POs we were talking about stakeholder management…here they are…

I’ve previously used the Battle Mapping metaphor to explain the process of identifying, analysing and then influencing your stakeholders (you can see this free video if you like) but the metaphor has always been a little “marmite”.

So in this module I improvised and created a really lo-fi set of cards (I literally printed them on my inkjet printer and laminated them on the kitchen table). These cards all contained different types of stakeholders represented as different animals.

If you operate in the world of product, you’ve probably heard of HiPPOs before (Highest Paid Person’s Opinion). Well it was mildly inspired by that but my HIPPO was something different.

Anyway…I couldn’t stop…I ended up with a whole host of different animals.

And surprisingly…my group of POs loved the exercise and asked if they could keep the cards. I didn’t feel they were ready and wanted to do some more work on them…so I said no.

But by the time we came back together for our next module I had evolved those cards…into a book! Well, a prototype of the book but it’s pretty close content wise and the metaphor has expanded really well too in to a really cool technique for stakeholder identification and management.

And the best part is that not only is this something that has helped that group of POs (and possibly others as well) but it’s a great example of product evolution in action.

I felt something (battle mapping) could be improved, I created something lo-fi and tested it with users, I took feedback and iterated on it. The product turned into something different (cards become a book and also a technique)…

Surviving The Stakeholder Safari - so much nicer than a metaphor of war…there’s more than enough of that in the world!

So watch this space…the alpha reviewers and the designer are helping me pull this together as we speak!

Actually…if you want to be the first to know when it’s live then just reply to this email and let me know.