I have been thinking about the challenge of regular communication lately. This has been particularly apropos given that one of the initiatives that I am involved in,has some very elongated delivery cycles.
The delivery cycles are so long in fact, that in regular stakeholder and interest group meetings my teams and I have scrambled to find interesting news to discuss.
This same problem manifests itself in a number of interesting challenges, most importantly, what happens when there is a dialog vacuum. I use that term to describe a situation where either you are not talking regularly enough to your stakeholders or where you’re not making them aware of the progress that you are making as it relates to the things that they are most interested in.
My observation is that if you are in this situation, one of more things might happen and none of these are good outcomes.
Making it up for themselves
This is probably the most common outcome. Many years ago, I had a manager who was strong on self-promotion. His belief was that if you’re not making your presence felt, then you’re potentially irrelevant and consequently more likely to be deemed dispensable.
I maintain that actually we’re all pretty dispensable, but I think I understand what he was driving at. If people can’t see and experience the fruits of your labours and efforts, then they may think you’re contributing very little and possibly doing nothing.
This not a good situation to be in because it means that you are potentially sidelined and eventually deemed redundant. More tricky is the fact, that because you aren’t front and center of their thoughts they often don’t know that you can support them or provide them with assistance in information related to their particular missions. What then happens is that they use best guesses in response to questions or asks of those that they work with, within and outside of the organization.
Sometimes guessing is appropriate but when it comes to features, capabilities, positioning and relevance of products, guessing is very dangerous and we should help colleagues to avoid having to guess.
Assuming the worst
This is the same as guessing or making it up for themselves but when it comes to innovation or capabilities around your product offerings, it often is bound up in the past experiences, past limitations or deficiencies that the individual may have experienced around a particular product line.
Again, we want to avoid the making the assumption that things have stood still or stagnated (unless of course they have); and under those circumstances we need to educate,re-educate and inform them.
Avoidance
This is a little more subtle. It is hard for colleagues to do when there is a structured approach to information gathering and insight collation. What comes to mind here, is the need to response to Requests for Information (RFI) , Requests for Proposals (RFP) and Requests for Quotations (RFQ).
While these kinds of requests can be very laborious to deal with, for bigger project spends they are pretty commonplace. One of the things I tell product managers to consider, is volunteering their time to review RFP/I/Q responses to ensure that those completing them have fully grasped the concepts and details of the asks from the prospects and clients.
These same requests can also be useful in feeding into your tactical strategic road-maps, because they suggest where prospects and clients want to take their businesses and consider how well aligned your product line is for meeting expectations.
Either way, don’t allow those who are putting proposals forward to go out on a limb uninformed. Some will be more determined to have confidence in their knowledge and understanding but there will be those who will just make it up or avoid responding in the right way. Neither of these is a good outcome, but as an attentive and engaged product manager you can help to alleviate these types of issues which often emanate from the dialog vacuum.