Stakeholder Management: 1 Powerful Tactic to Trust

If you’ve ever worked with stakeholders, you’ve probably built a mental checklist of what they want: new features, clear updates, fewer surprises, faster delivery, and maybe a fancy dashboard to make it all look good. Stakeholder Management is hard. But the problem with that is that this goes well beyond what they truly want in the first place. They’re just signals of something deeper. What your stakeholders really want is to be understood. They want to feel that you see them, their pressures, their constraints, their unspoken goals. To be fair, sometimes they themselves aren’t even aware of that need.

They want to know that when you make decisions, you’re not just protecting your Sprint or your roadmap, but their world. When stakeholders feel understood, trust flows naturally. Relationships build faster. Projects feel lighter. Misunderstandings shrink. And when they don’t? Every request becomes a battle. Every delay becomes personal. Every meeting starts to feel like you’re coming just slightly closer to banging the therapist's door.

Understanding is often mistaken for a soft skill. However, it’s ultimately the foundation of effective delivery.

Everything Needs to be Done, Yesterday

If you’ve been in product or project work long enough, you’ve heard the soundtrack of stakeholder panic, including these classic hits:

“When is my request done?”
“Can we ship this faster?”
“We really can’t afford another delay.”
“What’s blocking us?”

It’s tempting to roll your eyes or blame “business pressure.” But the truth is that a sense of urgency often comes from not feeling understood. When stakeholders don’t see that you get what matters most to them, every delay feels existential. Every lack of visibility feels like neglect. Their push for speed is often grounded in insecurity rather than actual value delivery. In our book The Anatomy of a Product (to be released in December 2025), we discuss how teams under stress often default to “reactive mode.” They start moving faster just to feel like they’re making progress.

The same thing happens to stakeholders. When they can’t see understanding, they demand velocity. It honestly is very much like a hamster on a wheel. Motion does not equate to value. The antidote isn’t to promise faster delivery; it’s to offer deeper clarity. Foster the relationship. Spend more time on the tough relationships than you feel comfortable with.

You’d be surprised how quickly urgency softens when someone feels seen. Stakeholders don’t always need a miracle; they just need to believe you understand why it feels like one.

Problem-Solving over Feature Delivery

Often, stakeholder tension comes from a straightforward disconnect: teams build what’s asked for, not what’s meant. A stakeholder says, “We need a dashboard.” You deliver a beautiful dashboard, but it doesn’t solve the problem. What they actually needed was insight to make sound decisions on, not more data.

This happens everywhere. Stakeholders describe solutions, not pain points. And teams, eager to be helpful, build the request without pausing to decode it. But honestly, how can we help if we don’t understand the problem to begin with?

Try asking these questions before starting any new request:

Stakeholders don’t feel understood when you agree with them. They feel understood when you ask the question no one else has thought to ask. Don’t be the “Yes” person. Dig deeper. Again, foster the relationship and create some mutual skin in the game.

Understanding Gets You Farther Than Rapid Delivery

There’s something magical about being understood. Once it happens, everything becomes easier: feedback, collaboration, even bad news. When people feel understood, they stop defending themselves. They start trusting your judgment. All of a sudden, recurring problems you might have had with this stakeholder will go away. Understanding isn’t just empathy. It’s an equal part of your strategy and goals, and outcomes should be anchored in empathy. It means you grasp the context behind every decision. You know which deadlines are real and which are just loud.

You sense when a stakeholder’s frustration is about your project, and when it’s about something upstream they can’t control. Filtering the signal from noise helps you form a diplomatic way of saying “no” when a problem isn’t really that big as they make it seem, or when the request doesn’t align with goals.

In one transformation project, a key stakeholder kept changing priorities weekly. The team was losing patience. But when we finally sat down to understand what was going on, we discovered she was caught between two competing executives, each with different definitions of “success.” Once we helped her navigate those conversations, the chaos disappeared almost overnight.

Understanding is not the same as agreeing. It means seeing the bigger picture. And once people feel seen, they’ll follow your lead even when things get tough. The Stakeholder Pyramid might help you identify where to dive into your conversations.

Stakeholder Management is More Than Executing Requests

Stakeholder management isn’t about keeping everyone happy; that’s impossible (although it’s what many strive for, admirably). It’s about making people feel understood, even when you can’t give them what they want. It’s the foundation of trust. When you truly understand your stakeholders, you can slow down without losing credibility, disagree without the dread of repercussions, and deliver without fear.

So next time you’re in a meeting and someone asks for “urgent” changes, don’t rush to commit. Instead, listen for the emotion underneath. Ask what’s making it feel urgent. Repeat back what you hear. Because the truth is, your stakeholders don’t want perfect products, faster features, or endless updates. They want to feel that you understand them, their goals, their constraints, their world. Once they do, they’ll give you something even more valuable than approval: trust.

And trust, not timelines, is what truly drives delivery.