Aligning over 12 stakeholders towards the same goal

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Product folks, we know that creating a quality product (MVP) and keeping teams aligned and engaged isn’t an easy task, right?!

To discuss how I aligned more than 12 stakeholders toward a common goal, it’s interesting to provide some context first.

So here we go: I joined Creditas about ten months ago, in the context of an M&A (merger and acquisition), specifically, the purchase of Minuto Seguros by Creditas. With this merger happening, we were restructuring processes, reallocating people, and of course, reviewing our product and acquisition strategies moving forward.

It’s worth noting that at Creditas, we have what we call a “Product Ecosystem.” It connects one product or service to another based on the customer’s journey and the jobs to be done. This creates customer repetition, allowing a customer who bought Product X also to purchase Product Y, staying with us longer. It also enables the customer to manage their portfolio of products/services with a single company.

In my case, I joined the Business Unit of Insurance, where our core business is selling auto insurance. It’s important to clarify that we are not an insurer but a brokerage.

Speaking of my personal journey, when I joined Creditas, I wasn’t in a good place. I had just left a company where I suffered severe psychological damage, harassment, and even colleague abuse. I wasn’t taken seriously when I talked to HR there, and I started to believe that the product area wasn’t for me.

Because of that, I lost confidence in my potential (impostor syndrome hit me hard) and in my abilities. But my leader, oh, my leader ❤. She did a fantastic job! I call it “taking me out of my shell,” haha. (By the way, I miss you, Malu. I’m saying this because she has already left Creditas). She restored my professional self-esteem, self-confidence and gave me complete autonomy and support to embark on a new journey full of challenges.

Speaking of challenges, this case was my first end-to-end initiative to be developed and delivered by me here at Creditas, shortly after I arrived. Minuto Seguros didn’t have a Product culture, so maintaining focus was more complicated. We needed to align constantly on what was being done and remind ourselves why. But little by little, we built this together.

Given the M&A context and the ecosystem strategy I mentioned earlier, we focused on experimenting and testing journeys to sell insurance to Creditas customers and vice versa. In this specific initiative, where I aligned more than 12 stakeholders, we aimed to sell Auto insurance to Creditas customers through the Creditas app, which had a different technology and already featured other Creditas portfolio products.

So, I started my discovery process, documented it in Confluence, understood scenarios, and possibilities, got closer to stakeholders, built relationships with them, interviewed users, created flows in Miro, and developed my hypotheses and value proposition for the MVP.

With this, I created forums with stakeholders to understand their needs and start aligning expectations for what was envisioned as an MVP. It was at this moment that it hit me: I was in a company with more than 5,000 employees, spread across 3 different continents, doing what I had always dreamed of. And that’s when various uncertainties, doubts, and insecurities began to surface.

So, I took a break, stepped away from the computer, and reflected on all the discovery work I had done. There were more than 12 areas to coordinate for an MVP?! I had never done something on that scale. I was being overly ambitious by trying to get everyone in the same room to align their roles.

I requested a one-on-one (1:1) alignment session with my leader, presented all the material, and asked if she had a different perspective, if I was on the right track, to validate the plan I had developed up to that point.

That’s when she praised all the discovery documentation, validated my plan, and said, “You were on the right track.”

But at that moment, I questioned myself: Okay, great! If I’m on the right track, do I really have 12 areas to align?

HOW AM I GOING TO DO THIS??????

I started researching and reading some articles on aligning MVPs with multiple stakeholders and a high level of complexity in communication. I shared my findings with other PMs on product community forums to generate insights. At some point, a matrix called RACI came up.

In this matrix, there were 5 columns and numerous rows, with each row representing an area. In the first column, you put the name of the area, and in the other 4 columns, you list key activities, requirements/needs, risks, and finally, if there are any dependencies.

Mine looked like this:

And it was through this framework that I scheduled a 1-hour and 30-minute kickoff session with the 12 areas. Along with two colleagues who were leading the initiative with me, we made the session happen and facilitated it so that all areas could contribute. We started with the why, what, and how, using Simon Sinek’s Golden Circle. In the “how” part, we invited the areas to include the items they needed in their respective rows. This way, we could understand what needed to be done to bring this MVP to life and make it work. Through this dynamic, we created alignment and coordinated a schedule.

Apart from this dynamic, there were countless alignment meetings, numerous discussions on Slack channels, and many, many threads.

However, in less than 1 month from the kickoff, we had managed to make the schedule happen and put the entire strategy and value proposition from the planning into practice to deliver a functioning software!

On the second day, we had already generated sales through the app. With that, we started delivering value to the business, and sales gradually increased as more bases/customers were allowed to access the MVP.

I want to express my immense gratitude to everyone who participated in this initiative. I won’t mention names because I might forget someone, haha. But seriously, a product is not built alone, so it’s important to seek collaboration and partnership from those involved.

Finally, I think it’s important to strengthen product communities with both success and failure stories. Why not?! I seek to promote more exchanges in communities because the exchange is mutual. Just as I had this need, others may have it too, and vice versa.

So, here’s a little contribution from me, and see you soon. I hope to bring more content for us to exchange.

If you’ve read the article and have any questions, feel free to reach out to me on LinkedIn. Here’s my contact so we can discuss any points further.

See you!