It's Independence Day in the USA and the presidential election is even weirder than the last time. I hope we can gather, listen hard, and respect — even appreciate — our differences. Diversity of thinking and experience is more powerful than any one perspective. Yes? And have some pie.

A product council is a small group of cross-functional stakeholders you bring together on a regular basis to make decisions that affect multiple teams. Regular product council meetings help you get to know your stakeholders better and surface disagreements early.

Sometimes a stakeholder comes in with a problem that is so dire that it requires you to disrupt the current roadmap. Other times, the stakeholder is just being melodramatic.

We have turned in our book, Aligned: Stakeholder Management for Product Leaders, to the publisher. Now it’s time to enjoy ourselves, and you’re invited! We are having book launch parties in major cities this summer and fall. We’ll talk about ideas in the book and delight in meeting the product people who made the book possible.

Melissa Appel and I will lead an online discussion on Stakeholder Horror Stories and what we learned from them. Bring your own to share! You can change the names to protect the not-so-innocent.

“The first meeting is proving how well I listen,” says Liz Lehtonen, founder and Head of Product at Worlds Untold.

So you’ve landed your first meeting with a bigwig stakeholder. How to listen….

The higher up your stakeholder is in the organization, the more difficult it can be to get their time and attention. For the most elusive stakeholders, consider an Unmeeting.

Upstream stakeholders like engineers, designers, and data analysts help bring a product to market. There are also “gatekeepers” who may need to approve your product, like a pricing committee.

After aligning everyone on a roadmap, you might think the task is complete. Very often, however, maintaining alignment is the bigger job. Priorities change, urgent issues come up, and difficult decisions must be made that require trade-offs. Coach Melissa Appel will lead a CPO discussion on Managing stakeholders to avoid roadmap derailment.

The reporting org chart isn’t the influence org chart. Whether you are coming into a new company or pondering your current one, thinking about your organization’s decision-making culture will help you understand how many people you need to involve in decisions and how much input is expected.

Asking for feedback from colleagues is a great way to enhance your working relationship. “How do you think that meeting went?” or “How do you think the project is going?” or “Is there anything you think we should be doing differently?”

Product Vision and Themes are the first steps in articulating a powerful, successful roadmap — and yet most roadmaps leave them out, focusing only on features and dates. We’ve developed a roadmap slide format focused on these missing ingredients. Download the free template at my Product Culture Academy.

Great roadmaps show goals, priority and options. They capture direction, discovery and delivery. Yet they stay simple enough for everyone to understand.

Power Players are the people who can make or break your product because they have the authority to insist you make specific changes. They can “swoop and poop” and tell you to completely change your direction at the 11th hour without fully understanding the consequences of their actions.

Many Agile teams have a built-in meeting called a “retrospective” or “retro.” It is a safe space to discuss working together. Effective retros are not about who gets credit or blame, but rather to identify problems and fix them. Often managers will not attend the meeting, to allow the team members to speak more freely.

Back in the day, I developed a fabulous new product for marketers. It elegantly solved a key customer problem. It was easy to buy and use. I was going to single-handedly propel my 50-person startup to stardom and an IPO. What killed my brilliant product? I forgot about the rest of the company. I didn’t have alignment from my stakeholders.t:

I once worked with a team of engineers who took on writing documentation for a full quarter. They had learned that their great product had confusing documentation. The doc team was fully allocated to other things, though. So they switched gears and solved the real customer problem.

Your CTO has a goal to improve uptime. Your sales team has an ambitious quota to meet. Finance is worried about margins. And HR is telling you morale is low. Every exec has a goal and every goal has an exec. Perfect! Or is it?

Smart product people do discovery with customers. Are you also doing discovery with your stakeholders?

The science fiction story I told was of this future world with happy, successful customers became our next big release.