Powerful Hack For Getting Buy-In From Stakeholders

If you’re not doing business cases, chances are your boss is doing it for you, or you’re just completely rolling the dice on ACTUALLY getting your things approved.

Business cases are very much still relevant, and even if you call it something different, it’s a critical part of getting stakeholder buy-in for your strategic ideas.

One of the most important things to include: What is the cost of NOT doing the thing you’re suggesting?

What is the cost of doing nothing?

By including THAT, you can end up with a much clearer and more compelling case for doing the work because you will be pitching that the path of inaction is more costly than the path of action.

Of course, you don’t want to be making anything up. You need actually to have this be the case.

More often than not, when I speak to product managers and product leaders — especially those a little earlier in their career — the critical thing they run into is that they have this GREAT proposal, this great logic for what they should be doing. But, still, they can’t get the stakeholders to buy into it. So they get forced into doing things they don’t want to do.

One of the BEST ways to build your case is to ensure that you capture the cost of doing nothing because chances are you’re already thinking about it. You’re just not putting it down anywhere or conveying it anywhere for your stakeholders.

Try that out. Put that in your next business case. Let me know how you go.

This was originally a video; check it out here → https://youtube.com/watch?v=o5zdWJGTa7Y