How to manage 20+ stakeholders without losing your mind

If you’re a PM, you’re not new to stakeholder management. It tends to be one of the most challenging aspects of the job, especially considering the time and energy it requires.

Throughout my career, I’ve been lucky to work with multiple stakeholders. But twice in my career, my luck was tested when I had to work with more than 20 stakeholders. And while reading this Reddit thread a few days back, I realized I’m not the only one.

At some point in your career, you’ll inevitably end up in a situation where you have to manage more than 20 stakeholders. In my experience, the traditional stakeholder strategies don’t work with that many people. So in this blog, I want to share how I navigated such a high number of stakeholders, what my learnings were, and how you can implement them if you catch yourself in the same situation.

Top 5 strategies to maintain healthy relationships with stakeholders

In my case, I first experienced working with 20 plus stakeholders while at Zalando, a European ecommerce platform specializing in shoes and fashion. While building an internal content management system that supported 300 internal users, I took care of over 20 active stakeholders across legal, marketing, operations, finance, data, engineering, product, upper management, and other dependent tech teams.

Not only was my inbox full, I also had tons of noisy Slack messages. This made me start to realize that the traditional stakeholder strategies don’t scale. If you’re in the middle of your stakeholder storm, or you suspect one’s coming, I hope this blog helps you stay calm and clear.

Classify the chaos in a structured way

When your stakeholder count is under five, it’s easy to manage expectations. You can meet with them 1:1, understand their goals and problems, and align via email. But once the count crosses 10, and definitely when it crosses 20, you need structure.

I had four categories of stakeholders, and depending on their classification, I had my set of actions:

• Involve directly
• Inform
• Monitor
• Ignore

Actively involved refers to the main stakeholders. The rest were additional ones. I used this modified influence-interest matrix to classify them:

Classifying your stakeholders this way helps you decide who you need to spend the most time with.

During the CMS rebuild at Zalando, legal and finance both had pressing asks. Legal needed compliance fixes to avoid regulatory issues. This was also part of the GDPR, which was rolled out in 2018.

Finance wanted a better dashboard for monthly reporting. Both felt important, but when I used this matrix, legal clearly had higher influence and risk. The cost of not sticking to GDPR was high. They became a core partner and fell into the category of “involve actively.”

Finance was grouped into a batch communication update, not because they didn’t matter, but because they didn’t need deep collaboration. Interestingly, once the GDPR work was done, we switched the finance and legal in their respective categories.

I recommend visiting the matrix every month to make sure the categorization is in accordance with the business and team needs.

Build one source of truth for prioritization

One of the biggest headaches for a PM is when the stakeholders ping on Slack or send an email saying “Can we do this feature by next sprint?” And when this happens 20 times in a week, it can drain all your energy. So it’s important to formalize one entry point as your single source of truth.

I used a simple Google sheet that was shared with all the stakeholders. No feature request that was shared via Slack or email was taken into account. The sheet had below questions:

• What’s the problem or request?
• Who are the users?
• Why is it important now?
• What’s the impact?
• What’ll happen if it doesn’t get done in the next quarter?

Considering that every stakeholder had to add this information, it not only reduced the number of feature requests, but also every feature submitted feature request was quantified. This made my job as a PM a lot easier.

Once, a stakeholder sent me a Slack message and said, “This is a must-have feature for the launch of the CMS.” I asked if it was in the tracker. It wasn’t.

I told them I’d review it once it was submitted with impact details. They filled the form, and we realized it wasn’t tied to the launch. It was just a nice-to-have feature. We never added it to the sprint.

This process doesn’t just protect your time. It forces stakeholders to think through their own ask.

Standardized communication rituals to keep all of them informed

When you have 20+ people relying on your product, you can’t rely on reactive updates. Most of the time, you’ll be pulled into meetings just for updates. And worst case, they might lose interest.

Here’s a model that has worked successfully for me:

• Weekly digest (email)
  • Three sections — What shipped, what’s in progress, what’s delayed and why, and what’re the dependencies
  • Bullet points only
  • One to two minute read
• Monthly alignment doc (Google Docs)
  • Roadmap with rationale
  • Decisions made this month
  • Trade-offs taken
• Quarterly stakeholder calls
  • Only high-influence stakeholders
  • 45-minute Google Meet to discuss big rocks, metrics, directional pivots

I created a “Friday Digest” that went out every Friday morning to all the stakeholders. Some read it. Some didn’t. But it became the single source of truth.

When someone asked, “Why was X not built?” I could point to the digest and say, “It was explained on June 7th.”

How to say no without burning bridges?

In stakeholder-heavy roles, you’ll say “no” more often than “yes.” But how do you say no without affecting your relationship?

Here’s how I handled it:

• Blame it on the process — “Please add it to the Google sheet tracker with all the details. If it scores high, we’ll prioritize”
• Transparently communicate trade-offs — “If we do this, feature X will be delayed. Would you prefer that?”
• Offer to escalate with them — “If this is urgent, I’m happy to escalate it with you and let leadership decide”

A senior marketing lead wanted a campaign-specific widget. I explained our current quarter’s focus was activation, not conversion. I asked if she wanted to raise it in our triage with the CPO. She declined. The clarity saved both of us time, and our working relationship stayed intact.

Conflict management and how to escalate with structure

There’ll inevitably be times when things will be out of control and you’ll have to escalate to higher management. In such cases, you need a framework to escalate decisions without becoming the bottleneck yourself. Here’s how I have structured this in the past:

1. Create a conflict doc with all competing asks
2. Add business impact, effort estimate, and risk level
3. Host a triage call with all parties
4. Let them negotiate with your facilitation
5. Document the final decision and who made it

This helped the stakeholders to directly talk with the higher management and find a resolution.

In one sprint, ops and data wanted the last frontend engineer for two different dashboards. I set up a meeting, showed estimated hours, and impact versus OKRs. We made the decision that the data team’s dashboard was more urgent and had a higher impact, and hence should be done earlier. We worked together, and no one felt blindsided.

Template and helpful tools for stakeholder management

Now that I’ve shared my top strategies, the table below contains some of my favorite tools that I’ve used, as well as a template for the different task types:

Final thoughts

Yes, managing stakeholders is difficult, and yes, managing 20+ stakeholders is tough. But if you have the right processes and structure in place, you can navigate any number of stakeholders. In my experience, the PMs who manage large groups effectively and who can align high-stakes stakeholders without derailing execution are the ones who get handed the next big product, the next strategic initiative, and the next leadership opportunity.

I recommend that you build your own framework and system using the insights provided in this blog and test it with the stakeholders. But the only way the framework can be effective is when everyone uses it consistently. This is the only way to manage 20+ stakeholders without panicking.

Featured image source: IconScout

The post How to manage 20+ stakeholders without losing your mind appeared first on LogRocket Blog.

This post first appeared on Read More