The Stakeholder Management Handbook
A 10-chapter, 25,000-word guide to the skill that separates good PMs from great ones. Learn how to map stakeholders, manage up, align cross-functional teams, resolve conflicts, and build lasting influence — with templates, scripts, and meeting agendas you can use today.
What You'll Learn
Map and Prioritize Stakeholders
Build power-interest maps, identify hidden influencers, and focus your energy on the relationships that matter most to your product.
Manage Up Effectively
Communicate with executives in their language — business outcomes, trade-offs, and timelines — and earn the trust that gives you room to operate.
Align Cross-Functional Teams
Get Sales, Marketing, CS, Engineering, and Design rowing in the same direction without positional authority or escalation.
Say No Without Burning Bridges
Decline requests, push back on scope, and defend your roadmap using frameworks that preserve relationships.
Resolve Conflicts Productively
De-escalate disagreements, mediate competing priorities, and turn friction into better outcomes for the product.
Build Influence in Remote Teams
Adapt stakeholder management for distributed organizations where hallway conversations and whiteboard sessions are not available.
10 Chapters Inside
Why Stakeholder Management Is the PM's Core Skill
Understand why influence without authority is the defining challenge of product management, and why technical and analytical skills alone are not enough.
Stakeholder Mapping: Power, Interest, and Influence
Learn structured approaches to mapping your stakeholder landscape so you invest your limited time in the relationships that matter most.
Building Relationships Before You Need Them
Learn systematic approaches to building trust and credibility with stakeholders before you need to make a hard ask or deliver bad news.
Managing Up: Working with Executives
Learn the communication patterns, framing techniques, and relationship strategies that work with VPs, C-suite executives, and board members.
Who This Guide Is For
New and Growing PMs
You have the technical and analytical skills but struggle with the political side of the role. This guide gives you repeatable systems for building influence from day one.
Senior PMs and Group PMs
You manage multiple stakeholder groups across business units and need advanced tactics for executive alignment, cross-functional coordination, and conflict resolution at scale.
Product Leaders (Directors, VPs, CPOs)
You coach PMs on stakeholder skills and need frameworks, templates, and assessment criteria to elevate your team's ability to influence without authority.
Tim Adair has spent 15+ years in product management, leading teams at startups and enterprise companies. He has coached hundreds of PMs on the skill most hiring managers say matters most: the ability to align people who do not report to you around a shared outcome.