Project: Overcoming stakeholders from Hell

Shopify logo and word mark.

Context

How do you push a project over the finish line when your cross-functional partners undermine your autonomy and weaponize executive escalations to push a personal agenda?

With difficulty, but never alone.

To solve this, I worked closely with a product designer possessing years of financial knowledge and an incredible well of emotional intelligence (the wonderful Scott Jefferis).

We overcame this challenge by combining his financial experience and people skills with my knack for positioning and argumentation. We learned a lot from each other along the way, too.

Constraints

  • Time frame: initially 2 weeks
  • Components: existing only
  • Format: responsive web

Context

The bank’s most “difficult” product marketing team wanted to launch a campaign about mortgage renewal tips in Canada.

The goal: to reduce the shock of higher interest rates for pre-pandemic home buyers approaching their first mortgage renewal.

The plan: the product marketers created a 7-part email drip that would point to an educational page, created by us.

Important note on team relationships

The bank had a coordinator role (the Digital Manager) specifically to:

a) Align UX with product marketing teams, and…

b) Communicate requests and feedback to the UX team.

Unfortunately, my Product Design partner and I had to do it ourselves for most of this project. But that’s why it’s worth writing about.

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The challenge

The project started on the wrong foot well before UX entered the picture, so we had to catch up in an extremely short amount of time.

These were the top stakeholder challenges we faced:

  1. Nobody looped UX into the kickoff meeting, eliminating the chance to ask questions.
  2. Marketing provided truly awful suggestions.
  3. The Agile Product Owner gravely misinterpreted the project intake materials, breaking trust with the Marketing team during the first review session.
  4. The Marketing team weaponized the escalation system by reporting us to a Vice President after that first review session.
  5. The Marketing team tried to dictate exact phrasing on the UX team’s deliverable, dragging out the project by 2 extra weeks.
  6. The Marketing Director tried to undercut UX autonomy by misquoting the organizaiton’s RACI chart (“Responsible, Accountable, Consulted, and Informed”).

Quite simply, these were the most hostile stakeholders I’ve ever seen.

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Yes, this is real.

I know this behaviour makes the stakeholders sound like mustache-twirling cartoon villains. We joked about that at the time, too. Unfortunately, this is all comically real.

How we overcame hostile stakeholders

Expand the sections below to learn more about how we responded to each stakeholder obstacle.

Redefining "Phase 0" prep work

The Agile team’s Digital Manager (a junior coordinator) didn’t include the UX team in the project kick-off. Their boss then overruled the brief to push UX in a different direction, which came back to bite us at the review phase.

The prep work hadn’t really been done, so I did a deep dive on all of the business partners’ intake material. My process included:

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

Uncovering stakeholder perspectives

We met with the marketing Product Owner. After 30 minutes of interviewing him, he eventually shared that his team had spent signifiant time conducting client listening calls.

Unfortunately, he hadn’t recorded those insights anywhere. Nor did he include them in the project brief. Why not? He had no answer.

Anyway, here’s what he (eventually) told us:

  • Few people made renewal decisions alone; they had to confer with a partner before proceeding (consistent with our UXR findings).
  • Even solo owners deferred decision-making until they had time to think about it.
  • 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.

Bringing leadership on-side

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

Positioning our work strategically

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 my political capital to be taken seriously on the important issues.

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

Politely outmaneuvering power plays

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 escalated to the director level at this point, so I led from the seat I was in. I equipped my leaders 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.
    • Case in point: the marketing team included a 6-page “positioning document” that included no actual positioning… only legalese and jargon.
  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 the 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 people who work in marketing.

The results

A clear performance boost

This informational page outclassed the bank’s existing product page for mortgage renewals.

26% of visitors signed in upon reading it, indicating the content answered their questions and made them feel safe in proceeding. It also generated 189% more started renewals and 150% more completed renewals over the bank’s existing product page for mortgage renewals.

Protected UX team autonomy

We established and maintained professional boundaries with a team that didn’t respect them. More importantly, we protected the relative autonomy of the UX department—and proved to executives watching this project that we could drive value and work with just about anyone.

New "Phase 0" guide for content designers

The UX department had a clean-looking figJam template for its product designers to start a project (which it called “Phase 0”), but nothing for content designers to ask the deep questions that orient us at the outset. That’s why I created a new page in our budding Content Design System based on this experience. It outlined all the information we should gather and the gaps we should spot, turning it into a workflow guideline for the entire department.

A new feedback model

The UX department had no centralized or documented feedback model either, so I created one (with a review from my Principal Content Designer).

I adapted our informal approach to a formal process of seeking signoff from different groups in a particular order, and—crucially—placed boundaries on which feedback the UX team should seek and reject from specific stakeholders.

The finished design

This case study is really about stakeholder management, but it would feel wrong not to include the finished design as well. I’m proud of how it turned out.

You can access the mortgage renewal tips page directly or scroll through the carousel below to review high-res screenshots.

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