Customer Discovery is an amazing tool for Product Managers to uncover the best solutions. It heightens empathy for your users by understanding their problems fully. It also brings the true ‘voice of the customer’ to the table as you and your team come up with new ideas.

But don’t forget, Customer Discovery is a team event. Always include your Designer, Engineers and anyone else on your team to share in the learnings. Curious why this is important? Check out my piece on Get your Engineers involved in Customer Discovery.

Another group you don’t want to miss with Customer Discovery is your stakeholders! This could be your leadership team, other product managers or members in other departments that work with your customer or are impacted by your team’s product.

Your stakeholders bring to the table a fresh perspective and different goals. It’s important that they feel informed and included on what your team is working on and learning.

So how can you keep them involved? Here are a few ways.

Include them when defining the WHY

Anytime you do Customer Discovery, you first need to think through what you want to learn. You should never want to go into a customer session without a learning agenda. Even if you’re doing generative discovery, it’s helpful to have a learning agenda to get the most out of your time with users.

Let’s imagine you’re exploring additional payment options for your customers during a workflow. You’ll want to do discovery to see what options they would like to see, what they use today and how it could fit into your product.

But this is a great example of a learning objective that could be important to other teams you work with too!  Especially if your product has multiple opportunities for the customer to checkout, add payment details or update their profile. Those teams may be curious if they need to expand their product offerings to include more options to your customers.

This is also true if your discovery could lead to dependencies on other teams. In the example of payment options, say you decide that you want to add ApplePay as an option for customers.  Are there any upstream or downstream implications if that payment option is added? Maybe your finance team or customer profile team need to make updates to their product too.

When you’re crafting this learning agenda, include your stakeholders. See if you are trying to learn the same thing or solve similar problems. Or even better, sometimes when you align on learnings you’ll find that your stakeholders already have some of the answers you are looking for!

Ask if your stakeholders would like to be interviewers on the agenda too; especially if they will need to make updates in their section of the product, allow them time with the customer to ask questions specific to their needs so you are all successful with the discovery time.

Make discovery an open invitation

Everyone wants to be invited to the party, even if they can’t attend :) Do the same with your stakeholders. If you’re hosting a Customer Discovery session, make them aware of when it is and what you hope to learn.

For my team, we try to host discovery sessions at the same time every week. We include everyone on our team (Product, Design, Analytics, Engineering, etc.) as well as include our closest product teams and stakeholders.  

Prior to the session we share out the learning agenda so all internal groups know if the session will be helpful to them and try to attend. No hard feelings if they can’t, we are all busy!

Putting Customer Discovery on your calendar, even better if you can make it a repeating meeting, let’s your stakeholders know when you are having sessions and can rearrange their schedules if they’d like to join.  

If you can’t make discovery a repeatable event, try your best to schedule discovery at least a few days in advance.  We know sometimes it’s difficult to get customers on the phone, it may even be last minute, but try to give your team a heads up so everyone can participate and learn as much as possible.

Share out learnings after the session

Your stakeholders are busy people running their own teams. As much as they would love to attend every learning session, that won’t always be possible.

Figure out the best way to share learnings after customer sessions. A few ideas could be:

• Share a recorded version of the session - If you are using Zoom, Google Meet or Teams, make sure you ask your customer if it’s OK to record the session. Then share the recording with the group afterwards. Include any specific timestamps of “ah ha!” moments you want your stakeholders to take note of so they don’t miss it
• Send a quick recap email - Use your learning agenda as a template and add in the feedback from the session. Call out important notes and anything you found surprising. Send this around to your stakeholders and see if anyone else has heard similar insights; you may uncover similar themes across your product teams
• Post a customer research template - Many UX teams have formats for sharing feedback after sessions that are organized and hit on key themes such as a Customer Journey Map, Opportunity Tree or Jobs to Be done framework. Find a model that fits what you are trying to learn so stakeholders can clearly understand the progress your team made and ask questions.

No matter what format you use for sharing insights, make sure you include the problem you were focused on for the discovery session as well as the key takeaways after the event. Outline next steps for your team and if any of your stakeholders may be impacted by upcoming product changes.

Also get feedback on your chosen communication method. Understand if the way you are sharing learnings is helpful or if there is a better way to keep everyone aligned. Iterate on your communication process the same way you’d iterate on your product.  

Having your stakeholders involved in discovery keeps everyone informed on what your team is working on and helps to solve problems together faster.

What other tips do you have for including your stakeholders in discovery?