How can you balance stakeholder needs when developing a product strategy?

As a strategist who has led multiple strategic initiatives in healthcare I have always done so with a firm understanding of my stakeholders needs and pain points. I start with collecting feedback from across the organization and outside of it as well. When we looked at redesigning service lines, we talked to clinicians, practice site managers, and executive leadership. But we also sought out patients and patient advocates for their insights. I then anonymized the feedback to remove what I call, The Big Fish in the Tank bias. From there it was a matter of identifying trends and performing root cause analysis to ensure we were actually solving the problem, not putting paint over it. Listen to stakeholders and respect their input.

In my experience, involving stakeholders in product strategy helps to create a sense of shared ownership that helps the team win together. It’s important to inclusive, take in feedback and leveraging the expertise of the team. Also, grounding the team in data that represents the scope of the problem and solution is critical to drive alignment. Product strategy should not feel like a zero-sum game as this negatively impacts the morale of the team.

Aiming at win-win solutions is great, a move towards right direction. However, one should be careful in interpreting ‘balancing stakerholder needs …’. For example, should you decrease prices to adress customer needs, pay higher prices to suppliers to balance their needs etc? ‘Balancing’ does not give decionmakers a criteria to make decisions, when different stakeholders’ needs contradict. How would you decide, when your stockholders ask for profits but your customers lower prices? Apart from market consitions/ competition, can you explain a decrease in pricing? An overarching question is whether stakerholder needs is an aim in itself, or a means to satisfy stockholder needs.