One of the most critical, and most overlooked, skills in product leadership isn’t technical or even strategic. It’s stakeholder engagement. As Bruce McCarthy puts it:
“Even the most perfect plan can fail if your organization isn’t aligned.”
Early in his career, Bruce launched a promising new product, only to watch it flop. Why? He hadn’t brought sales or marketing into the process. Despite achieving product-market fit, it failed on product-company fit. That experience taught him what so many leaders learn the hard way: if your stakeholders aren’t with you, your plan doesn’t stand a chance.
Shift from Managing to Engaging
Stakeholder management is often treated as a checkbox task. But Bruce reframes it as leadership: “It’s not about control – it’s about bringing people with you to do something great.” The same customer empathy skills that help you understand external users? Apply them internally. Understand what truly motivates your teammates, and you’ll unlock powerful alignment.
Bruce McCarthy’s 4-Stage Stakeholder Engagement Blueprint
Identify Stakeholders (TIPS Framework)
Don’t just look at the official company organization chart; it’s often misleading or “worse than useless” because the “real org chart” is complex, involving relationships, favors, and personal dynamics.
Use a two-by-two grid to prioritize stakeholders based on their influence (their ability to affect your plan) and interest (how much they care about what happens).
- Core Team (High Influence, High Interest): These are the people actively working on your project. They have the power to act and are highly invested.
- Power Players (High Influence, Variable Interest): These can be executives, founders (even if not in an executive role), or people in central departments (like bureaucracy) who can approve or block your plan. They might not be deeply interested in your specific project, but they have significant power.
- Impacted (Low Influence, High Interest): These are teams who will be affected by your work, like customer support, who will deal with the outcomes (good or bad).
- Subject Matter Experts (Low Influence, Low Interest): Though they may not have much influence or direct interest in your project, they possess crucial information for making good decisions. You need to involve them early to ensure accurate information and prevent misinformation from spreading.
Anyone (from the board to customers) can be a stakeholder. The challenge is knowing who really matters.
Prioritize Your Efforts
You can’t win everyone over, so focus. Ask: Who really calls the shots here?
In one of Bruce’s roles, it wasn’t engineering (despite being the largest team) that held the power – it was sales. Understanding that shifted how he worked and ultimately helped accelerate his career.
Understand Before Influencing
This is where true engagement begins.
High-bandwidth communication matters. One-on-one chats – over coffee, lunch, or Zoom – build trust. Once relationships are strong, async methods like email or Slack can work.
Read between the lines. Anticipate objections by role:
- Sales: “Will this help me close deals?”
- Engineering: “How much extra work is this?”
- Finance: “What’s the ROI?”
Non-verbal cues are critical. Bruce suggests mirroring, fronting (body turned fully toward them), making eye contact, leaning in, and even the triple nod to signal empathy.
Match communication styles. Adapt your tone, cadence, and even word choices to make people feel seen and heard.
The more understood someone feels, the more likely they are to engage deeply and honestly.
Lead Without Authority
Great stakeholder engagement isn’t passive – it’s leadership. It means guiding people across the org toward a shared vision, even if they don’t report to you.
Bruce advocates for participative leadership:
- One person – the Directly Responsible Individual (DRI) – owns the decision.
- The DRI must gather input, build consensus where needed, and drive alignment.
- They don’t do all the work – but they are accountable for the outcome.
This approach blends clarity with inclusion. It’s faster than consensus, more informed than top-down mandates, and more effective than trying to please everyone.
Tactics for Leading as a DRI
- Align with leadership on goals, and with teams on priorities and metrics.
- Communicate clearly and often – especially the “why” behind decisions.
- Build informal relationships. Bruce once made weekly trips to HQ just to take a finance stakeholder to lunch. That relationship helped unblock crucial decisions later.
- Use async docs to gather feedback at scale, especially for execs and founders.
- Lead through influence, not command. Even CEOs are more effective when they convince rather than dictate.
Why This Matters
Learning to navigate the real org chart – the one defined by influence, not titles – doesn’t just increase your project’s odds of success. It can supercharge your career.
Stakeholder engagement is how you get buy-in. It’s how you drive alignment. It’s how you lead, even when you’re not in charge.
Want to become indispensable? Learn how to bring people with you.
This article draws on excerpts from Bruce McCarthy‘s talk, “Managing Stakeholders“, at Business of Software Conference.