How do you resolve stakeholder conflicts?

Budget constraints: In a study conducted by Deloitte on project management challenges, 32% of the respondents cited limited budget as a significant factor contributing to stakeholder conflicts and project failures. 💸 Because of competing priorities: When there is a limited budget, stakeholders with different interests and objectives may vie for a larger portion of the available funds. This can lead to conflicts as stakeholders advocate for their own projects or initiatives, causing disagreements and tensions. 🤝

Finding a common goal is crucial and the most important task in resolving stakeholder conflicts because it helps create a shared understanding and purpose among stakeholders. When everyone agrees on a common objective, it becomes easier to align interests, foster collaboration, and work towards a mutually beneficial outcome. It provides a foundation for effective communication, negotiation, and compromise, ultimately leading to more successful conflict resolution and project outcomes.

One reason of stakeholder conflicts is varied (and sometimes) conflicting interests between different stakeholders. For high priority initiatives specially, it is important to have shared goals amongst the important groups and stakeholders within the organization.

Identifying the root cause of the conflict is key, but difficult at times. Some conflicts are complex and multifaceted. There are differing perspectives and emotions involved. In addition, some people have access to more information that cannot always be shared. In order to identify the root cause, the team has to commit to open and honest communication and rally behind the key objectives. From here, there team can better manage conflict between stakeholders.

Unspoken assumptions are often at the heart of stakeholder conflicts. Until these assumptions are exposed, any alignment you might appear to achieve will be temporary. So often, when you can get all of the unspoken assumptions out on the table and clarify them, people start to naturally coalesce around a solution.

Each organization has a particular culture that is very difficult to change even if you were to swap out most of the leadership, it somehow lives on. Understanding that culture deeply and being aware of its blindspots allows you to avoid walking into many stakeholder conflicts before it even happens. In general, having a good understanding of the culture of the organization you are dealing with and the players involved will allow you to pre-guess which conflicts will arise given any decision point and you can yeet your way out of it before it even happens.

I completely agree. People tend to focus more on personal differences between stakeholders and their varying perspectives; focus should ever always be on the actual cause of the conflict. This is harder than it sounds, as sometimes it could be emotional and justified by logic. It could take many steps before uncovering every making layers of false-positives.

Understanding the “motivators” of the disagreement should always be the first step. Are people arguing over the actual topic of the debate? Or are there different motivators, like personal issues, misaligned incentives and so on? Without going to the root cause, it’s going to be much more difficult to resolve it. It’s like trying to open a door by pushing harder.. when it says “pull”. Building rapport with both sides, taking a step back from the issue, to then understand the actual motivators is key. From there, it’s important to influence both parties by using the right tools. There are different influencing styles that can help in these situations. I recommend the course: Positive Power of Influence.

Your plan is spot on. Knowing the root of the conflict helps find the right fix. It’s all about asking the right questions, active listening, and understanding everyone’s point of view.

How to Clarify the product scope? Simple! By getting a sign off on the product spec from stakeholders, before moving it to product development. Discussing & Clarifying the product scope in advance, is the best way to avoid conflicts. It keeps all the stakeholders well-informed about what’s being developed, manage their expectations of the end product. This will avoid scope creep too!

The scope should tie directly back to the product and business goals. Use a traceability matrix and key metrics to communicate how a feature relates to the primary objectives.

For every stakeholder, their needs are urgent. As a PM , you may not be able to convince those seniors, especially if they are the elephant in the room. What to do? Seek help from your manager or higher. I once asked my manager and VP of product to pitch in, to help resolve the conflicts and arrive at a decision.

An Action Priority matrix is a quick but effective visual to illustrate stakeholder priorities. Visuals are often more impactful than lists and data tables.

Trust in product development is “built in”, not “bolt on”. Seeking feedback is one step, building and closing the feedback loop is the next. Product managers have an opportunity to build deeper strategic relationships with stakeholders by closing through feedback loop: informing stakeholders how their feedback was taken into consideration and/or activated for product development—or not

Use cost, time, and effort quantifiers when negotiating. Instead of saying something is out of scope or scope creep, approach the discussion from a discovery mindset. Understand the problem to be solved and the drivers behind the request so you can lead stakeholders to a data-driven decision.

Ownership often can also be a significant issue - either too many chefs (or restaurant managers) in the kitchen or, conversely, no one who is truly willing to be fully accountable. Even if you are able to get stakeholder alignment on a strategy, lack of a single clear executive owner will cause a product to drift.

Very important to remain neutral in order to gain trust from all parties in the conflict. Depending on what the conflict is, use an acceptable framework (or two) to evaluate each stakeholder's position/problem or opinion. Basically, score the impact of adopting each of the stakeholders positions. Assuming that the framework used is able to provide a clear "best option", the next step is to walk the stakeholders through the evaluation process to ensure that the inputs and weighting was accurate. Make each stakeholder part of the solution. At that point, once the best option becomes obvious, it should be fairly easy to get everyone back on track since reasonable people can usually accept the result of a fair, unbiased assessment.

Stakeholder conflict resolution is part of any leaders work life it is just not limited product management. Here are tips I leverage ▶️ Clear understanding of the final goal ▶️ Actively listen different stakeholders without any bias. There are times where the conflict is due to misunderstanding or poor representation of the view. Above two steps sometime enough to resolve the conflict ▶️ Provide solution based on the data rather than emotion. ▶️ Be open and transparent about your process and data with your stakeholders