Differentiate Stakeholders: the Squeeky Wheel Shouldn't (Always) Get the Grease

Some of your stakeholders will be loud.  Even obnoxious.  If your objective is to reduce pain right now, then by all means do whatever it takes to shut them up.  But I would argue that if you want to develop a strong product, then you should think carefully about who you are reacting to and who you can (tactfully) ignore.

Let me step back.  This assumes that you are collecting feedback from your users and other stakeholders before implementing anything.  If you aren't doing that, then the first step is to initiate an honest dialog with your users about what changes should be made to whatever system you are managing.  

This could be applied to most products, but consider the implementation of a Content Management System (or ongoing product management of your Web presence)  in your organization.  You will have the following types of users (mostly site visitors, followed by basic CMS users and then a small set of power CMS users):

Chances are, your power users are the loudest.  These are the folks who already have installed three different Open Source CMSes and develop Web sites on the side for their friends.  They are very opinionated, and have just enough artillery to potentially make you look silly in large meetings (although perhaps not enough background to really understand how to go from a developed-at-home-in-an-hour implementation to an infrastructure for a large site).  

 In many ways, these power users are often asking for things that don't really matter, at least in the Big Picture.  The people you really want to support are your External Site Visitors (or internal visitors in the case of an intranet).  These are the folks that are probably even less able to clearly articulate exactly what they want, but are probably the most important.  So if you are staring at a list of functionality requests, and you do manage to have an item that would benefit a regular old site visitor, then seriously consider it.  This may even mean that you get yelled at by other stakeholders, but remember that your site visitors are what really matter.  Here are some concrete ways that you can differentiate your stakeholders:

• Make sure to get input from the different types of stakeholders you have (and make to identify the key ones)
• When negotiating your next round of enhancements, potentially even have all requests categorized by the type of stakeholder that will be affected.
• Whenever you decide on your next block of changes, make sure to cover each type of stakeholder (and have an especially good reason for not satisfying your largest stakeholder group, if you decide to do so).
• From a measurement perspective, you could track which group of users benefits from the various changes you make.