The Art of Stakeholder Management
What separates junior from senior data scientists
“Something’s gotta give!”
I just, unfortunately, picked the wrong “something“.
My company had just set our new OKRs for the quarter, and after a meeting with my product manager (stakeholder), we decided to re-prioritize my work to focus on her analysis request.
But as a Data Scientist, you rarely have just one priority, and between meetings, unread emails, and missed Slack notifications (aka new ad-hoc requests), I could barely find uninterrupted time to do my work.
So I decided to start declining most meetings and blocking my calendar with “focus time”—arguably the best Google Calendar feature.
And just like that, I started finding my flow again, and most importantly, making progress on my new priority.
My manager didn’t have a problem with me managing my calendar, I was even encouraged to decline “pointless” meetings.
So with my calendar cleared, I worked mostly uninterrupted for two weeks, but by the time I submitted my analysis, I realized that the angle I had chosen didn’t fully align with our new business initiatives. To make matters worse, my stakeholder told me that a lot of my insights had already been uncovered by another team months before.
Now, my issue didn’t stem from the meetings I didn’t attend or emails I didn’t reply to in order to meet my deadline.
The problem was that in my attempt to isolate myself and push aside time wasters, I also neglected the one person who I needed to keep an open channel of communication with at all times…
my stakeholder.
It matters more than you think
Today I want to talk about how to avoid making this and similar mistakes, by mastering the art of Stakeholder management — believe me, it’s an art, even though there is a method to it, which I will gladly show you.
I will also share my personal approach, the one I’ve been using and refining over the past 5 years, which played a significant role in getting me a substantial promotion while working at Epidemic Sound.
Because knowing how to communicate effectively with your stakeholders and keep them engaged will not only help your work drive business impact but also help you level up in your organization, which usually translates into more $$$. And who would say no to that?
Now that you have a better idea of the importance of developing this skill, let’s go over the who, what, and how of stakeholder management.
1. Identifying
Who is are my stakeholders?
A common misconception, especially among junior data scientists, is the belief that their stakeholders are limited solely to those making requests. In reality, stakeholders include anyone impacted by a project or initiative.
Unfortunately, this mistake can lead you to create issues for other teams and even get your project put on hold halfway through it.
This is why you always start by asking “Who could be impacted by my work?“
2. Analyzing
What do my stakeholders need?
Once you have identified who your stakeholders are, you need to focus on understanding their needs.
Your main goal is to identify your key stakeholders—the ones you need to pay the most attention to. Because, let’s face it, you can’t afford to give everyone your time.
These are some of the questions you should be asking: “What are their expectations?“ and “What are their level of influence and interest?“
3. Engaging
How do I keep my stakeholders engaged?
Not all stakeholders are created equal, but once you have a good understanding of who they are and their needs, you can decide on the best ways to ensure continuous engagement and alignment with them
How do they prefer to communicate? How will they measure success? How can I build and maintain relationships? these are some of the questions you should be asking.
This chart is a good tool to help you decide how much you should engage each type of stakeholder.
💡 Rather than treating this as a step-by-step approach, treat it as a framework with iterative steps. This process requires continuous monitoring and adjustment to make it effective.
Stakeholder management, in the wild
Let’s now see what this would look like in practice.
Scenario: Imagine you work as a Data Scientist embedded into a product team and your product manager (PM) asks you to run an A/B test to help improve conversion rate (CR) for the company’s app.
Identify: One of the first questions you should be asking (yourself and your PM) is “Who could be impacted by this experiment?“.
In this case, the list could look something like this:
Product team
Marketing team
Customer Support team
And potentially, a lot more teams.
Analyse: From here, you want to analyse each by asking questions such as “What are their needs/expectations?“ and “What are their level of influence and interest?“
Product team: They need to ensure the test aligns with the product roadmap and does not interfere with upcoming features or releases.
Marketing team: They might be planning a campaign that could be affected by the test results or the changes being tested.
Customer Support team: They need to be aware of any changes that might affect user experience so they can prepare for potential inquiries or issues.
One of your key stakeholders is undoubtedly your PM since they requested the experiment, and improving CR is part of their OKRs for the quarter.
Since the PM is in charge of the product team, they automatically become the point of contact (POC) for aligning with the rest of the product team (although you might also want to get the tech lead involved).
Since it’s important to also align with both the marketing and customer success teams, the next step is to figure out who will be the POC for each one of those teams, by default these are their corresponding managers.
This means, your key stakeholders for this project are:
The PM (plus tech lead)
The marketing manager
The customer support manager
Given they all have high influence and high interest in the project, we must keep them in the loop at all times.
Engage: The question now is, how should you engage with each one of them?
The answer depends on the type of project, the individual preferences of everyone involved, and the way your organization is structured, but the key here is to take the lead and ask.
🚀 My approach
For key stakeholders (those I need to manage closely) my default approach, which has worked quite well for me over the years, is the following:
Schedule a 30-minute meeting (or longer if your stakeholders talk a lot) to sync and collect individual requirements.
Create a Slack channel or group chat with the key stakeholders that I will use to send regular updates and ask/receive quick questions.
Create a shared project document that clearly states who the stakeholders are, along with other relevant information.
After the initial meeting, I like to schedule weekly/bi-weekly meetings to sync. These meetings can always be replaced by a Slack message if everyone is too busy to meet (and they often do). However, it’s important to schedule them anyway to make stakeholders feel at ease and confident they won’t miss anything important.
💡 By the way, If you are thinking, “This sounds an awful lot like good ol’ project management“ then you wouldn’t be wrong. Stakeholder management is a specialized area within project management.
Your way to a promotion
Developing this skill played a significant role in my career development. In fact, during my time working as a Data Scientist at Epidemic Sound, it’s what stood out the most during my mid-year review and helped me get a promotion.
But that’s a story for another day 😉 Just know that this is a skill you simply can’t neglect if you wish to level up as a Data Scientist.
Thank you for reading! I hope this article helps fuel your career growth.
See you next week!
- Andres
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Great read, I liked that you included stakeholder identification process and why it is crucial!
Love your stakeholder analysis graph! So clear and engaging