Stakeholder management and the limits of the Inspired model

I have a lot of time for Marty Cagan. Inspired shaped how I think about product, and I still hand it to people who are learning the craft. But the longer I have worked inside a regulated bank, the more I have noticed something the empowered-team model quietly assumes and rarely says out loud: a context most of us do not actually have. The book is brilliant about what great product teams do. It is far less honest about the conditions required for that to be possible.

What the empowered model gets right

Start with the strengths, because they are real and I apply them every day. Outcomes over output. Teams empowered to solve problems rather than mindlessly ship a roadmap of features. Continuous discovery instead of a single big bet at the start. Falling in love with the problem, not your first solution. Small autonomous teams with genuine product leadership. This is the right north star. When I push my team to optimise for activated users rather than shipped tickets, I am drawing straight from that well, and it works.

At its best, the model is a defence against the feature factory. It gives a PM the language to say no to the loudest opinion in the room and yes to the evidence. I would not want to run a team that had never internalised it.

The context it quietly assumes

Here is the part that goes unsaid. The empowered-product-team ideal assumes a well-funded technology company with a mature product culture, real team autonomy, and stakeholders who already believe in product as a discipline. Take that context away and the advice starts to wobble. A regulated bank does not have it. An enterprise carrying twenty years of process does not have it. An agency selling billable hours does not have it. A bootstrapped startup with no funding and no team does not have it.

In those worlds, stakeholder management is not a distraction from the real product work. It is the real product work. The discovery is only half the job. The other half is building the alignment that lets anything you discover actually ship.

Risk and Compliance are not obstacles

Cagan can be a touch dismissive of stakeholders, and of the PMs who have no choice but to operate inside heavy constraint. In the empowered framing, stakeholders are often something to be managed around or empowered past on the way to the customer. Inside a regulated bank, that framing is simply wrong, and acting on it gets you nowhere.

At BUUT, ABN AMRO's neobank, I align more than twenty stakeholders across Risk, Compliance, Operations, Engineering and Design to ship onboarding. Risk and Compliance are not gates standing between me and the user. They are co-owners of the outcome. If the onboarding flow is not defensible to a regulator, it does not exist, no matter how elegantly it converts. So I bring them in early, as collaborators on the problem rather than reviewers of a finished solution. That single change in posture is a large part of how we lifted onboarding conversion by seventy per cent. Not by routing around the constraint, but by designing with the people who own it.

I have been every stakeholder at once

I learned this from the other extreme too. As a bootstrapped founder building Coworksurf to four million euros and more in GMV, I was every stakeholder at once. Product, growth, risk, finance, support, the lot. There was no empowered team to be empowered, and no one to align except customers and reality. That experience cured me of any romance about autonomy as a precondition for good product work. Most of the world operates under constraint. The PMs who thrive are the ones who treat constraint as the material they build with, not an excuse for why the model did not apply.

The synthesis I actually use

So I am not throwing the book out. I am completing it. Keep the discovery rigour and the relentless focus on outcomes. Keep falling in love with the problem. But treat stakeholder management as a core product skill in its own right, not a tax on the work or a sign that your org is broken.

In practice that means a few concrete habits. Map your stakeholders properly and understand what each of them is actually incentivised by. Bring Risk, Compliance and Operations in as early collaborators, not as a final approval gate. Build trust deliberately and ahead of time, because trust is the currency you spend when you need a hard yes quickly. Translate product outcomes into the language each stakeholder already cares about.

The empowered model implies that the best PM is the one with the cleanest discovery process. In the environments most of us actually work in, the best PM is brilliant at both discovery and alignment, and refuses to treat the second as beneath them. That is not a compromise of the Inspired ideal. It is what it takes to make it real.