Communicating effectively with Stakeholders using stories
By Anil Jaising Published On November 21, 2021
As a product owner or product manager, you have been watching the progress of your team towards your roadmap or release plan. As you collect this data about the progress of your product, you know you need to communicate both good news and some not so good news to your stakeholders and executive management. Many new product managers and product owners struggle with the messaging of their communication. How to structure the news? How much to say? How to say enough to elicit the feedback or help they need?
I have communicated roadmaps, progress, facilitated stakeholder interactions for prioritization and always found myself looking for ways to communicate. Each interaction taught me how to refine my message. One of the many formats I have tried that I like is the “Telling Stories”. The original idea comes from a PMI Institute Blog
The Scenario
For a very large software product that had stringent dates due to external regulatory requirements, we had a large team of 80 members and we were using LeSS (Large Scale Scrum) The team would deliver product increments every two weeks. Executive Management and Stakeholder were invited and attended a sprint review every two weeks. Given the high profile nature of the deliver of the product, they were all over it. They needed a story. They needed to know progress, they needed transparency
What helped?
Based on the Blog, I have a standard canvas that I use.
For Release 10, The good news was that the team had completed 98% of the work. The legal team was reviewing new regulations and they found about 59 estimation points of work that was added to meet our commitment to the external regulators. The story was good and the team needed more time to complete the additions as well as fix the high priority defects
How I crafted the story
Additional material that I added to my story
What do you think of the story format to convey information. What could we add to this article to help you with using it? Please share your comments.
Anil Jaising is a Certified Scrum Trainer®, Certified DevOps Institute Trainer and a Certified Training from the BACK of the Room – Virtual Edition Trainer. Anil teaches Certified Scrum Master (CSM) and Certified Scrum Product Owner (CSPO), Advanced Scrum Master (A-CSM) workshops from Scrum Alliance He also teaches Training from the BACK of the Room In Room and Virtual Edition). He is also the chief product owner of a telemetry plugin At A Glance on Atlassian Jira.
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