Journal / Product
Stakeholder management through uncertainty
I joined the Crave Connection podcast — hosted by Nayab and Adrienne — to talk about one of the more underrated skills in product management: keeping stakeholders aligned when you don't have all the answers.
What the talk covered
- Why uncertainty is a communications problem, not just a planning problem — When stakeholders don't know what's happening, they fill the gap with the worst-case scenario. Proactive, honest communication creates more confidence than false certainty ever could.
- The difference between transparency and oversharing — Not every internal debate needs to be externalised. The goal is to give stakeholders enough context to trust the process, not to burden them with every unresolved question.
- Managing up vs. managing out — Aligning senior stakeholders often requires a different approach than working with cross-functional peers. The stakes, timescales, and vocabulary are different.
- How to say 'I don't know' without losing credibility — Admitting uncertainty with a clear path forward is more reassuring than confident-sounding answers that later turn out to be wrong.
- When to escalate and when to absorb — Not all ambiguity needs to go upward. Knowing which decisions require stakeholder input and which you can resolve autonomously is one of the most valuable judgement calls in product management.
Why this matters
Stakeholder management is one of those skills that gets underweighted in product hiring and development conversations — partly because it's hard to measure, and partly because the failures tend to be invisible until they're not. By the time a stakeholder relationship breaks down, it usually feels sudden, but the erosion was gradual.
The conversation drew on experience across early-stage and scaled product environments, including work at Toggl, Koa Health, and Telefónica Alpha, where the stakeholder landscape ranged from founding teams to NHS clinical leadership to enterprise procurement.
