A product development project coming to an end. It’s time to launch. That of course is the whole reason for the project is to launch a new product. But have you ever tried handing over your project to the next. It might be the sales department, the marketing department, or the product team if you are lucky enough to have one of those. The handover is a hard handover, you might have a meeting with a demo, that’s it. Good luck selling the product we developed.
A few weeks or months pass by and the person you handed the project over to, comes back to you and yells; “This is garbage! Nobody wants to buy what you developed”. The person you handed over to asks you for a change of design. It might be a minor change or a major change anyway, you are already on to the next project, and this is bugging you that this old project is haunting you down.
You might have to work overtime for the next couple of weeks due to this design change and the fact that you are already assigned to a new project. This sucks! What went wrong you might be asking yourself?
The past couple of months while developing this new product. You realize you had zero meetings with the person you were going to hand this product over to. Did you meet this person’s expectations? Did you ask this person to test the market with the prototypes you created to get feedback on the customer’s needs and requirements?
If no is your answer, you haven’t engaged and managed your stakeholders properly during the product development process. You might think, stakeholder management? Isn’t that something for Project Managers? You’re neither right nor wrong. Stakeholder management is for everyone! Even for Mechanical Engineers, Mechanical Design Engineers, R&D Engineers, whatever your title might be.
Why stakeholder management is important?
In a successful product development project, several people with different skills and backgrounds contribute to the project. This is the essence of innovation, collaboration!
As a mechanical engineer we are (in some projects) the core of the development team (Beware of bias: Other types of engineers might think the same). If it is a small team, you might not have a dedicated project manager. In this case the roles and responsibilities of a project manager might drop into your lab as you are the one with the overview of the project.
You might be full-time on this project, others might be half-time on this project. Do you think you are equally invested in this project? The answer is no. Therefore, you have to make sure these people are contributing to the project, and you have to make sure other stakeholders that could have valuable input give you the input and feedback you need. This is essential to make sure that it is not a hard and cold handover in the end. And to make sure your old projects are not haunting you.
Where do you start?
Identifying you stakeholders is where you should start. Think about the lifecycle of this project or product:
Someone have to approve the budget for your project.
Someone have to manufacture this product.
Someone might want to see a profit or capital gains on this project.
Someone might have a problem this product is going to solve.
Someone might be using your product daily.
Someone might have a brand to maintain and build.
Someone might have to sell this product.
Someone might have to ship this product.
Someone might have to maintain this product.
Someone might have to…
Some of the above questions you should ask yourself to identify the important stakeholders in your project. It might not be all above that is specifically important to your project, you might think of other interactions to your project and eventually product. Some of these stakeholders might be individuals, others might be multiple (for example, customers).
Good stakeholder management always starts with finding the right stakeholders.
I have identified my stakeholders, what now?
Think about how often you might want to engage with your stakeholders. Some of these you might see every day in the office, some of them you have limited access to; it could be a customer in another country. Identify how regularly you think you will have interactions with your stakeholders and identify how you will interact with them. Some of them could be face-to-face, others could be through a phone call or an email.
If some of these stakeholders work in the same office as you, try to eat lunch with them.
Because once you have identified your stakeholders and you have identified how and when you are going to interact with them. It is important that you build relationships with some of them. Building relationships is essential in business. In the Godfather, Michael Coleone might be saying the famous words: “It’s not personal, it’s strictly business”, that might sound cool in a gangster movie, but is far from the truth of the real world. Business is personal! It’s about building relationships.
It is important to build relationships with your stakeholders, because only in this way you can start to trust each other. And when two people trust each other, that is when the magic of collaboration starts to happen. Some cultures might not be willing to share the harsh truth. You must hear the harsh truth if this is the fact. It could be that some of your stakeholders might think you design for one of the concepts is just straight up ugly. If people don’t know you, they might be too polite and say it looks nice to not hurt your feelings.
We have to remember that in product development we always have to be hunting for data. Data, data, data, that is what builds great products. So you can actually see stakeholder management as a way to get better and more data for your project.
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