The Art of Stakeholder Management

What separates junior from senior data scientists

“Something’s gotta give!”

I just, unfortunately, picked the wrong “something“.

My company had just set our new OKRs for the quarter, and after a meeting with my product manager (stakeholder), we decided to re-prioritize my work to focus on her analysis request.

But as a Data Scientist, you rarely have just one priority, and between meetings, unread emails, and missed Slack notifications (aka new ad-hoc requests), I could barely find uninterrupted time to do my work.

So I decided to start declining most meetings and blocking my calendar with “focus time”—arguably the best Google Calendar feature.

And just like that, I started finding my flow again, and most importantly, making progress on my new priority.

My manager didn’t have a problem with me managing my calendar, I was even encouraged to decline “pointless” meetings.

So with my calendar cleared, I worked mostly uninterrupted for two weeks, but by the time I submitted my analysis, I realized that the angle I had chosen didn’t fully align with our new business initiatives. To make matters worse, my stakeholder told me that a lot of my insights had already been uncovered by another team months before.

Now, my issue didn’t stem from the meetings I didn’t attend or emails I didn’t reply to in order to meet my deadline.

The problem was that in my attempt to isolate myself and push aside time wasters, I also neglected the one person who I needed to keep an open channel of communication with at all times…

my stakeholder.

It matters more than you think

Today I want to talk about how to avoid making this and similar mistakes, by mastering the art of Stakeholder management — believe me, it’s an art, even though there is a method to it, which I will gladly show you.

I will also share my personal approach, the one I’ve been using and refining over the past 5 years, which played a significant role in getting me a substantial promotion while working at Epidemic Sound.