"Make it happen."
In product management, this usually translates to "managing up." It means brute-forcing alignment. It means pushing the ball uphill.
You spend your Tuesdays in "quick syncs." You spend your Fridays formatting slide decks because the VP of Sales likes the roadmap in blue, but the CTO likes it in Jira. You write long emails explaining why the date slipped, hoping to avoid the inevitable "Can we jump on a call?" Slack message.
We did the math on this "push" approach. It is ruinously expensive.
Senior employees lose about 63 workdays per year to ineffective communication. If you are paying a Product Lead $200k, you are setting fire to $54,860 per year just because the organization can't agree on what "Done" means.
But the financial cost is nothing compared to the Trust Cost.
The Trust Battery
Stakeholders—executives, sales leaders, customer success managers—don't micromanage because they are evil. They micromanage because they are anxious.
Think of your relationship with them as a Trust Battery.
High Charge: They trust you. They give you autonomy. They focus on Outcomes.
Low Charge: They panic. They demand daily updates. They focus on Outputs.
Most PMs try to charge the battery by holding more meetings. They try to "talk" their way into trust.
But you can’t talk your way out of a problem you behaved your way into. You need a system that demonstrates control without you having to be in the room. You need to stop making updates happen and start letting them happen.
Here is how you build a machine that manages your stakeholders for you.
1. The Roadmap: Killing the "Expectation Gap"
The biggest source of stakeholder friction is the Expectation Gap.
This happens when you send a static roadmap (a PDF or a slide) to the leadership team. It looks great on Monday. By Wednesday, engineering hits a snag. The timeline shifts.
But the PDF on the CEO's desktop didn't change.
When you finally deliver the reality two weeks later, the CEO feels lied to. You weren't lying; you were just working. But because the signal was static, the trust evaporated.
Stop sending snapshots.
You need a roadmap that is a living window into reality. This is why we built Released Roadmaps to pull directly from Jira. It allows you to create different "views" of the truth for different stakeholders, without maintaining separate documents.
The "Board View" (For Engineering/Product): Granular, status-based, focused on flow.
The "Timeline View" (For Execs/Sales): High-level, thematic, focused on "When."
When the data changes in Jira, the roadmap changes on the stakeholder’s screen. You don't "update" the roadmap. You just do the work. The Expectation Gap vanishes because everyone is looking at the same live data.
2. Feedback: The "Black Hole" Problem
Your stakeholders—especially Sales and Customer Success—are on the front lines. They are gathering critical intelligence.
Usually, they throw this intelligence at you in the worst possible ways:
A DM in Slack: "Hey, Big Client X needs this feature to sign."
A comment in a Google Doc.
An ambush in the hallway.
This is the "Black Hole." You might track it, or you might forget it. But the stakeholder assumes you forgot it. So they ask again. And again. This is the "squeaky wheel" method of product development, and it kills strategy.
You need a centralized clearinghouse for internal intelligence.
With Released Feedback, you give your internal stakeholders a place to put that energy. But it’s not just a suggestion box; it’s a rigorous pipeline.
Capture the Intent: Stakeholders can log feedback directly linked to their accounts/deals.
Link to Reality: You attach their feedback directly to the Jira ticket.
The "Context Injection": When your engineers pick up the ticket, they don't just see a spec. They see who asked for it. They see the business case.
Suddenly, Sales doesn't feel like they are shouting into the void. They feel like partners in the build.
3. Closing the Loop: The "We Heard You" Signal
This is the step 90% of product teams miss.
Let’s say you actually build the feature the VP of Sales asked for. You ship it. Does the VP of Sales know?
Usually, no. They find out three weeks later by accident. That is a massive wasted opportunity to charge the Trust Battery.
In the "Let it happen" model, the system closes the loop for you. Because the feedback is linked to the Jira ticket, Released can automatically notify the specific stakeholders who "wished" for that feature the moment it ships.
"@SalesLead - That Enterprise SSO feature you flagged? It’s live. Go close the deal."
You didn't just ship code; you handed them ammunition. That is how you turn a stakeholder from a critic into a champion.
4. The Narrative Update: Outcome over Output
Finally, we have to fix the "Status Report."
Most internal updates are boring because they focus on Activity: "We moved 15 tickets to Done." "Refactored the API."
Your stakeholders do not care about your activity. They care about your Impact.
Bad: "Launched the new onboarding flow."
Good: "New onboarding flow is live; early data shows a 5% drop in support tickets."
The "Mum Effect" and the Red Light
There is a corporate instinct to hide bad news (the "Mum Effect"). We want every report to be Green.
A "Green" report on a delayed project is a lie. Stakeholders can handle bad news; they cannot handle surprises.
Embrace the Red Light. Use your update to flag risks early. In the Released staging area, you can curate your Jira items into a narrative. You can highlight the wins, but you can also clearly, dispassionately state the blockers.
When you systematically share "Red" status updates early, you prove that you are in control. You prove that you aren't hiding.
Summary: The View from the Top
You can keep pushing the ball uphill. You can keep "managing" stakeholders with frantic emails and defensive meetings.
Or you can build a system that lets alignment happen.
The Roadmap keeps them oriented on the "When."
The Feedback Portal makes them feel heard on the "What."
The Automated Notification closes the loop on the "Done."
When you get this right, the meetings stop. The "quick syncs" disappear. You aren't spending your energy managing their anxiety; you're spending it building the product.
And that is a much better way to work.
If you want to dive deeper into Stakeholder Communication, take a look at our interactive article on the topic.
