The one product skill that will make you awesome
In my previous post, I focused on the functional capabilities and conceptual frameworks that I’ve found helpful as I entered the technical product management domain for the first time.
In this post, I want to focus on the one skill that — once mastered — will increase your odds of success the most as a product manager. The skill is shuttle diplomacy. This skill increases in importance as the size of your organization increases.
Term origin
While the concept of shuttle diplomacy has been around for millennia, the earliest mention I could find describes the efforts of then U.S. Secretary of State Henry Kissinger in 1973 to cease hostilities after the Yon Kippur War. Lexico describes shuttle diplomacy as the negotiations conducted by a mediator who travels between two or more parties that are reluctant to hold direct discussions.
While I am not suggesting that the stakes of your product work compare to Kissinger’s, you can and should leverage the technique to your advantage to achieve your goals (launch features and products).
My initial exposure
When I was just starting my career in product management, a mentor of mine recommended I read the O’Reilly book Product Roadmaps Relaunched: How to Set Direction while Embracing Uncertainty. As a new product manager aspiring to improve, I devoured the book in a few sittings. I loved the feature prioritization formulas, and still use an adapted version of those formulas to have roadmap discussions with my teams.
Looking back, though, the chapter on stakeholder engagement and buy-in — which highlights shuttle diplomacy in detail — has been far more impactful in my career so far.
“For the greatest part of humanity and the longest periods of history, empire has been the typical mode of government.” ― Henry Kissinger, Diplomacy
The term empire-building has negative connotations, but I’d argue that building and maintaining “empires” is a natural phenomenon within an organization that is impossible to avoid.
Understanding internal motivation
As a product manager, you are spending your time navigating across multiple functional domains (e.g., product, engineering, design, marketing, sales, data science). Every field has one or many paths to promotion, but they all entail taking on more and more responsibilities over time. Every. Single. One. Once you recognize that, you have a few options:
- Ignorance: You can ignore that empire-building is happening in your organization. If you do this, expect each project decision to feel ad hoc in nature. Be prepared to sit in meetings where no one can seem to agree on what is the best path forward to achieve competing agendas. Or better yet, only the loudest voices are heard. Final still is the dreaded Highest Paid Person’s Opinion or (HiPPO) approach, which Tarun Kohli does an excellent job of describing in his post below.
You may succeed with the HiPPO approach (it’s politically safe), but you are also unnecessarily allowing someone else to control your career trajectory. If your project is successful, the HiPPO will receive credit for their sage approach, and if your plan fails, you will bear the burden of the decision.
2. Acceptance: Use the tendency of others to want to build their autonomy and influence to your advantage. To do this effectively, you must first understand their motivations and then connect the dots for them on why your feature/product/service will help them be successful as well.
How to identify a missed opportunity for shuttle diplomacy
The phrases below, often used in group conversations, highlight an opportunity to improve alignment in an organization.
- “Let’s take this offline”
- “Let’s table this discussion.”
- “Let’s zoom out on this topic.”
- “Let’s take a step back for a moment.”
- “Let’s gather more data before making this decision.”
- “How do we know this is what customers want?”
When you hear these types of deferring and probing phrases, take a note to check in with that person before your next meeting to discuss your proposal. There is often more to their question than what it seems, and you need to be able to speak openly to surface any underlying concerns. 1:1 meetings are great for these topics.
How to make shuttle diplomacy work for you
What I am going to describe below will only be useful if you are authentic in your interactions with your stakeholders. You cannot feign interest in the concerns and motivations of your stakeholders or your efforts will fall flat.
In Robert Greene’s book, The Laws of Human Nature, he lists several maxims that we should keep in mind when working with others. If you are looking for a summary of the book, Evgeny Medvedev provides a brief one below.
The law of human nature that is most applicable to shuttle diplomacy is Green’s 7th law, the Law of Defensiveness. In this chapter, Robert provides five strategies for becoming a master persuader, which is, in essence, a core responsibility of yours as a product manager:
- Deep listening. Put your long-term plan and goals aside for a second as you listen intently. Look for any non-verbal cues that either reinforce or diverge from what your stakeholder is telling you. If things are still unclear, probe for more information. Phrases such as, “Tell me more,” “Can you dive deeper into your last point?” or “Can you unpack that?” work wonders. Once you have a clear understanding, repeat what they are saying in your own words (e.g., What I hear you say is X, do I understand correctly?).
2. Be positive. Bring a positive mood to the conversation. People feed off others energy, and if yours is negative or neutral, you’re going to have an uphill battle. Set aside any preconceived notions that you may have for your stakeholder and accept them for who they are. Try to get to know them personally. I tend to find that the more I know about my co-workers, the more I like them. Likeableness is an underrated skill in product management.
3. Confirm their self-opinion. This approach feels more manipulative than it is. Remember the goal. Validating your stakeholder’s opinion can be as straightforward as saying, “maybe you are right” or “I hadn’t thought about it from that perspective, thank you for sharing.” Once you understand their opinion, look for the overlap between their views and goals and yours. What conditions must be true both of you to be successful? I’ve found over-indexing on delivering the right customer experience to be particularly helpful in these circumstances.
4. Understand their insecurities. Your stakeholders are probably adept at voicing their concerns about your project. However, determining why they hold those concerns may be harder to pin down. Your project may be exposing them to new responsibilities or asking them to achieve something that they have failed at in the past. You should have a plan to alleviate their concerns with qualitative, quantitative, or human capital (you) support to help them be successful.
5. Channel strong emotions. We touched on this earlier by suggesting that you repeat what you heard and use their language (mirroring). If your stakeholder is passionate about a particular topic and you can gain alignment during your 1:1, ask them if they would like to lead/reinforce the point during the next group meeting. You need to do everything you can to encourage ownership. Not only will stakeholders be more engaged with an “owner” mentality, but you’ll also receive less pushback from the group. It is easy to shoot down someone’s idea when it’s only one person’s. Opposing a group on a new project direction is much more socially taxing and unlikely.
Rinse and repeat for the number of stakeholders that you have for your project. The main criticism with this approach is the amount of time that it takes to perform shuttle diplomacy on the front end. Still, I’d argue that the time saved on the back end (along with the credibility you gain within your organization) is exponentially more valuable.
Tool for putting shuttle diplomacy into practice
I tend to practice shuttle diplomacy informally, but there are frameworks that you can rely on to gather your thoughts. In Product Roadmaps Relaunched: How to Set Direction while Embracing Uncertainty, they introduce the concept of a Shuttle Diplomacy Canvas. I won’t go into in-depth detail here, but the approach is to have a column for each stakeholder and capture the below information in rows.
Goals: What are they trying to achieve in the short, medium, and long term
Realities: What are they focused on right now
Options: What do they view as the paths forward to achieve their goals
Way forward: Which of the options helps them achieve the goals they described earlier in the conversation? Which options are at the top of their list, and why?
“Slow is smooth and smooth is fast” — Unknown
Now you know everything you need to gain alignment in your organization for the projects, features, and products that you manage. Good luck!
