Sakeholders are often viewed as gatekeepers for launching products. This stems from the way budgeting was done in the past. Many budgets were tied to marketing or sales budgets in these company, and Product Managers had to ask these people for investment. Most companies, not all, have solved this budgeting problem, but we have not solved the relationship problem between these two groups.
Designing for consensus of internal people who do not use or buy the products just creates terrible products. Stakeholders are responsible for informing the decisions the teams make, but they should not be the ones making those decisions.
So what really is a stakeholder?
A stakeholder is someone who will be involved or impacted in the creation of your product. Inside the company, this could be another team that has a dependency on your product and code. It could be a marketing person who needs to create materials to announce your product for customers.
Stakeholders have specific influence and knowledge that can help your product. Think of them as the "Ask the Experts" panel when running Design Sprints. Remember where that help starts and ends.
Marketing cannot accurately determine the features of the product, but they can tell you how to best present it to customers. Sales can inform you about how easy or hard it is to sell products to certain customers, and what people are asking for in meetings. They cannot tell you if a particular design or workflow can delight a user. Only testing and validation can tell you that.
To work with stakeholders effectively, you must remember this relationship. Don't fault them for speaking in solutions - this is human nature. It's your job to get into the root cause. Dig into the problems they are trying to solve, understand how they made the decision that this particular feature was important, and pull out the information you need. At the end of the day, you can make the decision and validate whether that feature idea is the right idea.
When given a solution or a very specific KPI you have ask questions in order to get an answer about the most basic thing: What is it that we want to achieve? It is about intent, not a concrete solution. This is an important difference that is often missed. The intent has to formulated in such a way that – as Stephen Bungay says – the Spice Girls’ questions is truly answered: What do you really, really want? It must be clear enough that the team knows where to look for a solution.
A good technique to the 5 Why's as method to use to get to the core of a person’s beliefs and motivations.
Your business will only succeed if your customers and users are satisfied. We need to build and design products for them, not to make internal teammates happy.