Bridging the gap with difficult stakeholders

The Agile team’s Digital Manager (a junior coordinator) didn’t include the UX team in the project kick-off, preventing us from asking clarifying questions.

That person’s supervisor also got involved, insisting that we had misinterpreted the marketing team’s request for educational content, steering our first iteration toward a conversion-oriented page.

I played catchup with a deep dive on all of the stakeholder’s project materials. My process included:

1. Formulating stronger goals for the campaign.
2. Articulating core benefits and features, which were mostly missing.
3. Identifying gaps, assumptions, and misrepresentations of the product.

After 30 minutes of interviewing the Marketing Product Owner (separate from the Agile Product Owner, who was supposed to interface between him and the UX team), we uncovered that his team had conducted client listening calls.

This was the source of his preconceptions and anxieties about what form the page should take.

Unfortunately, he hadn’t recorded those insights anywhere. Nor did he mention them in the project brief, and he could not explain why.

This is what we eventually learned second-hand about those unrecorded client listening calls:

• Few people made renewal decisions alone; they had to confer with a partner before proceeding (consistent with our UXR findings).
• Even solo owners tended to defer decision for several days or weeks upon being prompted to renew a mortgage.
• Most people felt anxiety about renewal (also consistent with UXR).

That’s why the stakeholders were so upset in the first-round review. They wanted the page content to educate and reassure, yet our Agile Product Owner steered us far away from that.

The Marketing team reported the UX team to a senior executive over false accusations of not producing work.

This was the reporting structure, for reference.

When our design leaders came to ask about progress, we leveraged all of my Phase 0 work and our thorough review feedback notes to demonstrate just how closely we’d been listening.

We also demonstrated a 1-day turnaround in handling review feedback, which helped to disarm whatever negative things the Marketing team had been saying. They ended up looking a little silly.

“If I showed this to our Head of Design, I’d get a promotion.” – My Senior UX Manager

The Marketing team dragged out the business review process for several weeks longer than necessary—almost entirely over granular word choices.

Here’s a single round of review feedback that I managed, for reference.

Even though the majority of the feedback was designed to intimidate and demoralize, I still responded to each one intentionally.

Why do that for hostile reviewers?

Being seen to align with our stakeholders (and to do it quickly) gave us cover to protect the elements of the page that really mattered for the users.

Given the tension between teams at that point, I sacrificed small-scale issues so that I could spend social capital on winning the big, structural content issues.

It also gave our design leaders immediate footing to show senior executives how seriously we took the project.

In a last-ditch effort to get her way, the Marketing Director tried to take away UX autonomy altogether. She argued that her team’s responsibility for positioning gave them the right to override any and all content and UI decisions that the UX team produced.

The discussion was for my UX Director, so I equipped him with a thorough case to disarm the Marketing Director’s bad-faith argument.

This was my rebuttal:

1. “Positioning” is a high-level relationship between the product’s use case and the customer’s needs (real or perceived).
2. Positioning does not include granular word choices, by definition.
3. Stretching the definition of “positioning” to get the exact wording you want is a bad-faith approach to collaboration.
4. The Marketing Director had actually misinterpreted the RACI chart that she was using to justify her point.
5. I included an actual example of positioning that I’d created on the page, which everyone loved (even the Marketing team).

I asked my leaders to combine this rebuttal with reminders about our performance so far:

• We aligned with 80% of feedback in every round of review (including petty demands).
• Design leadership signed off on our feedback responses.
• We hadn’t missed a deadline.

And it worked.

The Marketing team’s hostility looked pretty silly when the discussion was laid out like that. They backed off.

It also called into question their grasp of “positioning,” which is rather important for marketers.