Recently someone on my team was working on a recurring project with an external stakeholder. This will be the third year we’ve worked with the stakeholder. We like this external stakeholder, they’re a great advocate for their people, and very passionate about their work. But through that advocacy, they kept trying to increase the scope of the project to get the most benefit for their people.

My team member brought this to my attention in a 1:1 meeting. The external stakeholder put a block in my team member’s calendar for 2 months from now, but there was no email that came with it. The team member asked me how I would respond.

“I think we both know what this meeting is about, but we should wait to confirm. They’re probably just planning out the order of events. We know that 2 more meeting blocks are likely to come. If we don’t hear anything in a month, we can follow up with an email. Let’s set a reminder to discuss this again in a 1:1 next month.”

That dealt with the initial issue, but there were still underlying concerns. My team member told me they also got the feeling that the external stakeholder was getting frustrated with our refusal to increase scope, and also with the responses from our team. In one case, they told us that they had emailed our CEO and not received a response, and seemed kind of annoyed by it.

Everyone feels their asks are critical

I was saying to my team member that we don’t need to take on our stakeholders feelings here. They have their reasons for asking, and we have our reasons for saying no. Because they are so passionately advocating for their people, it makes sense they would be annoyed that the CEO hasn’t responded. A few years ago I would have agreed. I remember when I first got a cold email from a B2B salesperson. They offered some service that sounded pretty cool, so I took it straight to my boss, the CTO. I asked him if it’s something we’d be interested in. He responded “Oh I get about 50 of those a day, I don’t even open them anymore.” This was a hard shift in perspective for me. From the perspective of anyone making the ask, it seems rude to be ignored, but from the perspective inside the organization, there’s so many people clamouring for a second of your attention, that you can’t possibly respond to them all.

What is the nature of the relationship?

The other issue was that my team member felt this stakeholder was still operating as though their relationship had not changed. My team member has known the stakeholder since they were an undergraduate student, and so my team member felt as though the stakeholder was still treating them as a student. Now, my team member has been with our company for about 5 years, and has grown in skills and confidence over that time. They are a fully realized professional. My team member has pushed back on the increased scope that our stakeholder has asked for, but feels that the “no” is only heeded when I’m part of the conversation. Whether this difference comes from gender, titles, or whatever else, it’s still not the way we would want things to operate.

It may be that the stakeholder still sees my team member as a student, and so they feel they can keep asking for more. But my team member has been here for 5 years, I consider them a professional and an expert in their field. I am happy to keep being part of these conversations where we need to say no to preserve their relationship with the stakeholder, but I would like to get to a point where that’s not necessary.

I said to my team member, “If I was in your shoes, and I’m not saying that you need to do this, I would try to clarify this point about the relationship. You could say something like ‘I feel you still see me as a student, but I am representing the interests of this company, so we can’t put in more time than we’ve already budgeted for the work.’”

What is the opportunity cost?

Within curation, we have limited resources for our objectives. We can spare some of my team members time for this project, because it helps us build our relationship with the stakeholder’s organization, we don’t need to involve senior executives or other teams, and going into our third year of this collaboration we can do it with a relatively small time commitment from our side.

When we consider opportunity cost, we need to weigh the costs and benefits of what we’re doing, but also what we’re not doing. We know that this project doesn’t drive any revenue for us, but the benefits are that we build our relationship with this stakeholder, their organization, and it gives us access to a future talent pool that we might hire curators from. The cost is a handful of hours from 1 person on my team. Had we not done this project, we could have pushed some AI/ML processes ahead by maybe 1 day overall. So the opportunity cost is fairly low.

We don’t involve senior executives and other teams

If we needed the CEO, CTO, legal, or people teams to sign off on anything, that would add considerable cost and burden to our organization overall, and so we try to keep the project as light as possible. Aside from the cost, we need to consider what those people or teams could be doing with the time that would otherwise be sunk into this project. That could mean delayed decisions on staffing, partnerships, sales contract reviews, technology architecture, or overall strategy for the business. The opportunity cost of involving them in the project is too high, so we need to protect their time, so they can focus on the critical elements of their work to drive revenue for the business.

We keep the time commitment small

Because the time commitment is small, there’s a fairly low opportunity cost for my team member to work on this project. As the stakeholder asks for a larger time commitment or more meetings, the opportunity cost increases. The more time that goes into the project, the more time is taken away from my team member’s contribution to certain AI and ML projects going forward. Eventually that adds up, and could lead to multiple days or weeks of delay for the entire POD she works with. If that’s the case, there’s the cost of all the wasted time of the other POD members, but also a longer time-to-revenue for the functionality they’re building, customer satisfaction with our product, and potentially customer churn. The more time we commit to this project with an intangible benefit, the more very real and measurable benefit we miss out on.

Wrapping Up

So when a resource request gets out of hand, don’t just consider the cost of the time you put in, consider the potential benefits you’re missing out on. And if anyone ever asks “Why? You got something better to do?” The answer is probably yes.