Micro-Interview: Todor Dimitrov | Head of Product | Qaiware | Tips on Influencing Stakeholders
💬 "People are complicated, and their views, emotions, and understanding can change. Navigating this interpersonal landscape requires patience, support, and consistency."
Todor Dimitrov is the Head of Product at Qaiware, a company focused on fintech and payments.
In under 500 words, he shares:
How he determines the most critical stakeholders to work with…
His most formidable stakeholder challenge…
Some of his sources of learning…
And more…
Enjoy!
“How did you get into product management?”
After working as a project manager for 10 years, I decided to narrow my focus to business knowledge and hone my skills in a specific domain—online payments. Qaiware supported my decision and allowed me to shift my focus from project to product.
“How do you determine the most important stakeholders for you?”
We all learned the standard matrix of interest vs. influence at some point in our careers. It is a useful segmentation of stakeholders; however, I believe it is better suited as a project management tool.
When it comes to building or supporting a product, the types of people involved can be split into several segments based on the value that they bring—actors, enablers, sponsors, owners, organizational, and external.
“What do you know about influencing stakeholders now that you wish you’d known when you first started?”
People are complicated, and their views, emotions, and understanding can change. Navigating this interpersonal landscape requires patience, support, and consistency.
I wish I had known this initially, as it would have spared me countless hours of arguing over meaningless topics. After all, I am a person, and the same way I am trying to influence the view of a stakeholder, the person in front of me is trying to do the same. And sometimes, they are correct. Accepting this was the biggest challenge of my career, and I wish I had known it earlier.
What did your toughest stakeholder challenge teach you?
Someone who believes they have completed their personal development and have achieved complete self-awareness. In project management terms, that would be a high-interest, high-influence stakeholder with a superiority complex. Speaking with such a person about delivering a specific value or achieving a specific goal can either be irrelevant or extremely hard. I found out that the approach to influencing such a stakeholder is exactly the same as handling risks—you either avoid it, transfer it to someone else, or mitigate and accept it (combined on purpose).
What’s the #1 method that has helped you align all stakeholders in your favor?
Find out how each one of them perceives the value of your product.
How do you stay updated on the best practices in influencing stakeholders?
I believe that a lot of very smart people have spent a large amount of time researching the topic of communication and influencing people. Those topics are not new, and even though there are some emerging practices, first, I want to understand the underlying concept of it. That’s why I spend my time reading books such as Dale Carnegie’s “How to Win Friends and Influence People” and Leil Lowndes’ “How to Talk to Anyone”. However, none of that would be useful without spending time on self-reflection and improving your self-awareness.