Creating the right narrative is everything.

Mike Watson @ Product Party
3 min readJan 8, 2024

Are you having trouble moving your great ideas along in the prioritization process?

The truth is that many of us work in organizations where we don’t have free reign to have our dev teams build whatever we think is best. Whether we’re up against product leadership or stakeholders who believe they always know what is best, there’s a great chance we’ll have to lean on creating a narrative that will help us turn our ideas into a reality.

Let’s go over 3 ideas you can use to help the cause and get your leaders and stakeholders bought in on how you want to solve problems.

Aligning your product roadmap with your company’s overall goals is key.

This ensures your ideas and projects are relevant and contribute to the organization’s wider objectives. When your plans align with the company’s direction, they resonate more with team members and stakeholders. This alignment makes it easier to collaborate across different departments and ensures that everyone is working towards a common goal.

Understanding the big picture allows you to tailor your product’s features and updates to align with the company’s vision. This strategic alignment helps get buy-in from key stakeholders, as they can clearly see how your product supports the company’s broader objectives. It also aids in prioritizing product features, ensuring that the most impactful and relevant ones are developed first.

Setting measurable goals for each feature or update in your product roadmap is essential.

It allows you to track progress and tangibly demonstrate your product’s success. By having clear metrics in place, you can objectively measure the impact of your product and share these successes with your team and stakeholders. This not only boosts morale but also showcases the value your product is adding to the company.

Sharing these measurable outcomes is also crucial for maintaining transparency and trust with stakeholders. It provides clear evidence of progress and justifies the resources and efforts invested in the product. Regularly communicating these achievements helps keep everyone aligned and informed about the product’s performance, fostering a sense of accomplishment and shared success.

Implementing Minimum Viable Products (MVPs) is an approach to testing and validating your ideas with minimal risk.

MVPs allow you to launch a product with just enough features to satisfy early adopters and gather valuable feedback. This feedback is crucial for improving and ensuring the product meets market needs. MVPs also demonstrate the potential value of your product ideas to stakeholders in a tangible and low-risk manner.

Using MVPs as part of your product roadmap narrative builds trust with leadership and stakeholders. It shows that you are committed to innovation while being mindful of resources and risks. This approach enables you to adapt quickly based on user feedback, making your product development process more agile and responsive to market demands. Moreover, it provides a platform for iterative development, allowing you to refine and enhance your product based on real-world usage and feedback.

Final Thoughts

Aligning to your orgs (or on a lower level…product leader’s) goals, ensuring that everything you build is measurable to show the gains, and pitching your ideas around the ability to improve over a big bang incrementally are 3 ways that you can try to push your ideas forward within your organization.

Do you have any other tips for product people to get buy-in? Leave a comment below and let us know!

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Originally published at https://www.productparty.us.

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Mike Watson @ Product Party

Product Party is a newsletter focused on topics related to product management and tech, career growth, and welcoming our AI overlords.