Navigating Feedback from Multiple Stakeholders
Soliciting and processing feedback is a vital part of the website building process. It ensures that you’re on the right track in designing a website that truly serves your client’s needs.
Almost every professional who has worked on a large-scale project has been in the unenviable position of juggling contradictory feedback from multiple stakeholders or co-owners of a business. Big projects require untangling requests, setting expectations about what’s possible, and using discretion to ensure the finished product is both beautiful and impactful. Managing and incorporating feedback in these situations is an art, and mastering it can supercharge your output while decreasing friction with clients.
Focus on the big picture
A typical large-scale project involves input from groups across an organization, from content managers, to marketing executives, to directors, and more. Each group has their own area of focus, so their ideas naturally differ. To a marketing or sales representative, the website is an opportunity to generate leads and help convert them into customers. To an executive, it can be a great investor relations tool or a way to strategically differentiate the company from a competitor. When this feedback doesn’t directly conflict, it’s exactly what you need to build a well-rounded website that’s perfect for the client and meets their needs. But when it starts to pull the project in too many directions, it’s crucial to get things back on track.
Reconcile conflicting requests by asking a higher-order question: What does the company (or business)—not a particular department or person within it—actually need from the website? Consider what you learned during the proposal phase of the project and ask your client to rearticulate core goals and expectations with respect to their greater business. Then, measure all decisions against those goals. This approach helps ground most situations where conflicts arise and resets expectations.
Stakeholder conflicts can take many forms. Differences can emerge between business owners who have the same goals but a different aesthetic vision. They can also happen between you and your client or between teams in your client’s organization. Regardless of whether you’re directly involved in the conflict of visions, it pays to be able to navigate it gracefully.
Help stakeholders also see the full picture
While it ultimately falls on you to reconcile conflicts to finish the job, it can be beneficial to make those conflicts visible to stakeholders. If two parties can see that they’ve separately given you contradictory feedback, one of them may self correct and defer the decision to the other. At the very least, both parties will have a window into your decision-making process.
Implement systems, such as project management softwares, that make feedback visible to other stakeholders. At a minimum, you should document any feedback and requests you’ve received from different parties, so you can be proactive in flagging and addressing non-trivial conflicts of vision.
Clarify roles and responsibilities
Outlining roles and responsibilities at the outset can simplify the feedback process. Establish a central point of contact and who has the final say. In addition to clarifying everyone’s roles, you’ll want to define your own role, including any boundaries you’ve set.
You’ll also want to determine how you’ll document and communicate progress to stakeholders on various milestones so they feel consulted and informed. This can also reduce the chances that a client will send feedback at inopportune moments, such as after you’ve moved on to another website section.
Once you outline these roles with a complex client organization, you can create a strong framework for working on future web design projects with multiple stakeholders.
Take feedback in stride
Dealing with conflicting directives can be frustrating. While it’s important to stand up for your expertise, it’s just as important to avoid taking feedback personally. Often, difficult client feedback arises from confusion, uncertainty, or lack of knowledge. Consider that for some clients, this will be their first time working with a professional web designer.
When appropriate, express gratitude for the feedback they’ve given, demonstrate that you’ve considered it, and explain why you have come to a different conclusion. If you’re chosen to prioritize the input of one stakeholder over another, signal that you understand and value the other stakeholder’s input. Most clients are not looking to make your life difficult, but they do want to know that their feedback is heard and valued.
While you should defer to your client when you can, draw on your own expertise to steer them from decisions that can impact the success of the project or functionality of the website.
Think like a negotiator
In areas of dispute, people often think in zero-sum terms, meaning they assume only one side will end up winning. Expert negotiators are trained to not only look for fair compromises, but for mutually beneficial arrangements that competing parties overlook. When stakeholders seem to be in fundamental disagreement, try to look past their specific disagreement toward their larger goals. You may even discover the solution that works for everyone.
Juggling feedback from multiple stakeholders can be tricky, but by focusing on the big picture and clearly defining project goals with respect to your client’s core needs, you’ll have a dependable measure for evaluating contradictory messages. Use a platform that helps stakeholders give input in a collaborative way, where they can see what others are saying. Clarify roles, responsibilities, and boundaries from the outset to avoid friction and keep everything professional. By focusing on making the website as good as it can be, you can look past seemingly intractable conflicts towards solutions that satisfy the whole team.
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