Improve Stakeholder Alignment
12 weeks · 4 milestones
Milestone map
Milestone map
3 milestones
Stakeholder alignment failures have three common causes: different information (stakeholders are working from different data), different priorities (they agree on the facts but weight outcomes differently), and different constraints (they have hidden pressures — legal, political, resource — that they have not disclosed). Diagnosing which cause is driving a conflict determines which resolution strategy works. This milestone captures a real, live misalignment — not a historical one — before any resolution attempt.
Proof required
Submit: (1) a stakeholder conflict map: the two or more parties involved, what each party wants, what each party believes is true, and what each party's non-negotiable constraints are (if known); (2) a cause diagnosis (150 words minimum): which of the three root causes — information gap, priority difference, or undisclosed constraint — you believe is driving the misalignment, with the evidence that supports each identified cause; (3) a pre-committed resolution strategy: the specific approach you will use to resolve this conflict, written before any resolution attempt begins. Note: the conflict must be real and current — a hypothetical or a historical conflict resolved before this milestone was started does not satisfy the standard.
What gets checked
- Conflict map documents each stakeholder's position, beliefs, and constraints separately — a single summary description of 'the conflict' does not reveal the underlying structure; each party's view must be documented independently
- Cause diagnosis identifies the dominant cause with supporting evidence — 'it might be priorities' without evidence of what each stakeholder is optimising for is not a diagnosis; the evidence must show which cause accounts for most of the friction
- Resolution strategy is pre-committed and cause-specific — a strategy of 'have more conversations' is not cause-specific; a strategy of 'run a joint session where both stakeholders review the same usage data together' is specific to an information-gap cause
Resources
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Silicon Valley Product Group — Influence Without Authority
Go further: PM-specific frameworks for resolving conflicts without formal authority.
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