Who gets a seat at the decision making table

John J. Schaub 

Feb 13 , 2023 

In March I will be giving a talk on Decision Making in Product Management at ProductCamp Vancouver. As part of preparing for the talk I will be writing a few posts on some of the lesser understood aspects of decision making. In this post I'll cover the question of who should be involved in making a decision aka stakeholder identification.

In the real world decision making is a messy complex process with a multitude of stakeholders and deciding who gets to be at the table so to speak is a process in and of itself. The reality is that the more difficult the decision the harder this process often is. So here in not particular order is my personal list of criteria to determine if someone should be involved in or at least consulted in a decision making process. 

They have skin in the game: Decisions made by disinterested parties have an absolute horrific track record. What is worse is that because those parties do not suffer the consequences of their poor decisions they can and have continued to make the same awful choices long after anyone actually involved in the situation would have changed approaches out of sheer desperation. This leads to my foundational rule that your input into a decision needs to be directly proportional to the consequences you will suffer if the decision is made incorrectly. This rule when implemented in business tends to favour flat org charts with smaller groups responsible for making decisions. 

They have at least some level of expertise: You can not require that everyone at the table is a world renowned expert on whatever issue is being discussed but there needs to be real expertise at the table and an acknowledgement of the need for expertise and data. To this end you need to go far out of your way to prevent anyone who is unable to understand that data is vastly more valuable then their personal experience from being part of the process. Another thing to keep in mind when considering expertise is the potential value of unrelated experts, in short smart people are worth having around even if their expertise is seemingly unrelated.

They are willing to listen: If you are making a decision in a large group most of the stakeholders are going to need to spend more time listening than speaking. If someone is unable to do that you are going to need to find a way to sideline then so others can provide input. You may still need to collect there input but you might need to do it in a way that allows others to contribute as well.

They are willing to accept ambiguity aka risk: Save yourself a lot of time and frustration and make it clear from the beginning that decisions involve accepting ambiguity aka risk. If someone insists that there be no risk taken nothing will ever get done. You simply cannot have these people in a decision making role and worse if you push them out be prepared for a whole lot of I told you so when things go wrong as they sometime do.  Again avoid the drama and just don't invite them in the first place.

They are willing to accept that results will be imperfect: This is another area where I would advise taking a bit of a hard line and straight up excluding people who cannot grasp the idea that any decision is going to be an imperfect compromise. If you are unwilling to accept that you won't get everything you want then you should not be part of the process at all.

They are unable to prioritize: In any complex system you will be faced with dozens of conflicting priorities. A few of these are critical and many of them are frankly meaningless to the bigger picture. You need to make sure that the people at the table understand that some issues can be safety ignored. Providing this guidance is the role of the chair or facilitator and it is a key skill. One important note on rare occasion you will have someone out of left field insist that some seemingly inconsequential thing is actually very important. You would be well served to understand why they feel that way because it is often that they are bringing some perspective the rest of the group does not have.

By applying these filters you should be able to arrive at a list of stakeholders that can provide value and understand who you need to exclude.