What Can Product Leaders Learn from Elections?

WHERE TO: You as an awesome product leader who can drive any initiative you’re passionate about forward, gathering support along the way.

WHERE FROM: Not getting the buy-in required to get your ideas sponsored and wasting time and energy trying to convince everyone in the organization you’re right.

WHERE NEXT: Understanding how to segment your audience and which actions to take with each group to get support for your initiatives.

What do electoral politics and product leadership have in common?

More than you think.

The job of a product manager is to influence without authority. That’s precisely what politicians do in their campaigns too, they attempt to gain the support of voters who they have no direct control over.

I learned this in 2017 when I attended a workshop at Lean Agile Scotland led by Kate Gray and Chris Young, a political strategist and a tech lead, on “How to Win Hearts & Minds - Lessons Learned from Electoral Politics”. Their ideas stuck with me and I share their insights with many of my product leader coaching clients.

As with most things in this newsletter, I decided it was time to publicly share advice that I’ve provided countless times in individual coaching sessions. I hope you’ll find this paradigm as interesting and effective as I do!

Segmentation: The Key to Strategic Influence

In both electoral politics and product management, you need to win the hearts and minds of the people who have a say in the matter. In politics, it’s the voters, in Product it’s your internal partners, aka stakeholders. Have you noticed that it’s called “office politics”? Unfortunately, there’s a lot of truth to that title.

What is important to understand is that in both cases, you don’t need unanimous support. All you need is a majority! Therefore, you don’t have to worry about getting EVERYONE to agree, just SOME of them. You have limited time and resources - we all do - so the right approach is to focus your energy on the people who will transform your idea from a minority opinion to the agreed-upon path forward.

Addressing all the voters (or all the internal partners) to try and make them buy into your vision would be a never-ending task. That’s why political strategists apply the concept of segmentation. This is the process of dividing a larger group into sub-groups based on specific characteristics or criteria. We perform this task in market analysis as product folks, and now it’s time to apply it to the decision-makers at our company. In this case, you segment people based on their opinions about your initiatives.

In any election, as with every product initiative, there are three groups: supporters, opposers, and the undecided group. Each of these groups should be handled differently. Let’s dive into the basics of who they are and what your goal is with each segment.

Supporters: people aligned with you who don’t need convincing. Your goal: activate them to show up and speak up.

Opposers: people whose opinion contradicts yours and will likely never agree with you. Your goal: convincing them to go with the majority and stop protesting..

Undecided: people in the middle of the spectrum, who can either end up agreeing with you or with the opposition. Your goal: finding those who have goals aligned with yours and turning them into supporters.

Now that you understand the differences between the groups, it’s time to divide your efforts appropriately. As the great product manager you are, you are a master of prioritization.

Given the characteristics of the groups above, the biggest chunk of your time should be spent on the group who has yet to make their decision. They’re the people who might go to one side or the other and have the power to tip the scale in your favor.

You will also invest some time empowering your supporters, but more on that later. Most importantly, DO NOT focus on the opposition, as they will only suck your much-needed energy and not budge from their original stance.

Be careful not to document or publicly talk about the segments you’ve established.

Segmenting helps you define priorities and identify where to focus your attention. But the people in those groups shouldn’t understand you’re labeling them one way or another. Nor should other people in the organization.

But knowledge is power. Knowing who belongs to which group helps you pick the right battles.

Let’s talk about how you should invest your efforts in the two groups that matter most to get the consensus you need. Luckily, these individuals are probably those who are more likely to benefit your initiative. Your job is to surface those gains and to remind them of their current pains.

Supporters: Activate Them

Supporters don’t need convincing, they already agree with you. But that doesn’t mean you should take their support for granted.

Gray and Young emphasize the need to inspire supporters with a vision you want to make a reality. Ensure they understand the impact your chosen idea will have on them and their goals.

Remind them how important their endorsement is and get them excited to take part in the process. With supporters, it’s a matter of bringing them together with other enthusiastic members, regularly reassuring them of the benefits, and nudging them to actually vote.

Make sure they show up to meetings when the decision is being discussed. Call on them to share why they support the idea in that meeting. Suggest they meet with their connections who are on the fence to discuss the benefits they see. As Malaika Paquiot, former CPO of Avalanche Insights and current product advisor at Insight Partners, puts it, “get to know your allies and leverage them to influence more of your target audience”.

You want to promote the benefits to the customer segments you’ve chosen to serve, but avoid mentioning the groups whose needs you’re temporarily ignoring. No one wants to be categorized as unimportant.

Once you’ve activated your supporters to become advocates and help spread your idea to undecided individuals, it’s time to discuss how you should approach that group to make it more likely for them to see the benefit of your initiative.

Undecided: Build Empathy and Understanding

They’re the ones who decide elections - think about the swing states, and how candidates focus so much of their campaign efforts there. It’s because if the other candidate wins their votes, they will probably win overall as well.

In the same way, undecided stakeholders in your organization can make or break an initiative. Therefore, this is the group where you should focus most of your attention, as their opinions cause the scales to tip in either direction.

Start by building empathy for these individuals or groups by understanding their values and incentives. What will make them successful? What do they want to see happen? What do they want to avoid?

Find common ground between your ideas and how they will impact what these people value and how they are incentivized. Connect the dots for them so they see and internalize the alignment of your initiative with their goals being achieved.

Additionally, you want to emphasize how you are ready to listen to their ideas and challenges. Try scheduling time for follow-up conversations, retrospectives, or other opportunities to check-in. This builds stronger relationship with potential supporters, shows them that you are accountable, and provides a space to respond to new objections or issues.

Still, some of the undecided will continue apathetic.

It’s not unreasonable to think that not every initiative will affect every group. Point out to them that it seems either way the decision will not harm them. Encourage them to go with the crowd who is more directly impacted and may need this initiative to move forward in order to be successful.

If you feel it’s appropriate, share with them that if you were in a similar position you would do the same. By using this pressure of social reciprocity, you may get a few extra ticks in your column when the votes get tallied.

When thinking about these voters don’t assume that the opposition isn’t employing similar tactics. Be on the alert and check in with them to see how they are swaying. If someone expresses that they are now dedicated to preventing your initiative, stop investing in conversations with them and treat them as if they are opposition.

And that brings us to how to handle those who are vehemently against your idea.

Opposition: Neutralize Them

As we said before, don’t label your opposition publicly. Even though most people know that’s where they stand, you don’t want to start a war with anyone.

Either way, most likely, you won’t convince your opposition to join you. Your goal is to minimize their voice and drive them to “sit it out” rather than actively speak up against your ideas.

Keep in mind that treating them as the other team won’t benefit you either. Treat them as partners in success and remind them that all of you should be working towards common goals for the company. If they can see any benefit in the initiative, it might not be worth strongly advocating against it.

Another key way to quiet them is to preemptively bring up their objections when presenting your idea, and then downplay their issue in comparison to the positive value overall.

Not sure what I mean? Let’s review an example:

Think about what happens when you say something like: “Some of you may worry about the cost of this, which is fair. Luckily, the ROI is a multiple of 5x so, even though it’s expensive, the return is worth it. This is what we plan to do to keep costs to a minimum…”.

This removes the opportunity for your opposition to bring costs up as a strong objection, one that undecided individuals might have been swayed by if presented strongly enough.

Additionally, it anchors the conversation on what you want to focus on (in this example, the ROI, instead of the cost). Even if they still choose to surface cost as a BIG issue, it has already been framed as being taken care of and is not as worthy of further discussion.

If they raise other issues, rather than combating them yourself, call upon other supporters to explain what positive impact the initiative will have from their perspective to counterbalance the concern and bring in more voices of agreement. When other important leaders share their support, the opposers start realizing they might be outnumbered and it’s time to disagree and commit.

No one wants to sound like a broken record. So if the opposition doesn’t have enough talking points about their concerns, they will quickly become silent.

Finally, if you sense a groundswell of support at any point, survey or poll the group live, using a technique such as Roman Voting. You show everyone that there is a large backing for the initiative, which may sway some additional undecided folks to join but more importantly emphasizes to the opposing group that the battle is already lost.

Congratulations! You worked the political system in your favor, and you’ve gotten approval for your initiative! Now the only thing left to do is to deliver on your promises. Gray and Young state that, without this, you will never win again. This is what reinforces confidence in your leadership and vision, encouraging continued support from your followers.

Conclusion

Just like political campaigns try to win voters, your job as a product manager is to inspire and align your team and partners towards a shared goal. That is what influence without authority is really about.

Success requires strategic thinking, effective communication, and the ability to rally support from the segments that will benefit most.