To effectively influence partners, you must understand their priorities. A scrappy research method is to watch their executives' public interviews or internal all-hands meetings. This reveals their strategic goals and allows you to frame your proposal in their language, increasing its resonance.

Data's role is to reveal reality and identify problems or opportunities (the "what" and "where"). It cannot prescribe the solution. The creative, inventive process of design is still required to determine "how" to solve the problem effectively.

True problem agreement isn't a prospect's excitement; it's their explicit acknowledgment of an issue that matters to the organization. Move beyond sentiment by using data, process audits, or reports to quantify the problem's existence and scale, turning a vague feeling into an undeniable business case.

In fields like finance, communities with strong internal communication and vested interests make better long-term decisions than purely quantitative models. The group's "shared wisdom" provides a broader, more contextual view of risks and opportunities that myopic mathematical approaches often miss.

When driving major organizational change, a data-driven approach from the start is crucial for overcoming emotional resistance to established ways of working. Building a strong business case based on financial and market metrics can depersonalize the discussion and align stakeholders more quickly than relying on vision alone.

It's not enough for platform PMs to interview their direct users (developers). To build truly enabling platforms, you must also gain wider context by sitting in on the developers' own customer interviews. This provides deep empathy for the entire value chain, leading to better platform decisions.

In siloed government environments, pushing for change fails. The effective strategy is to involve agency leaders directly in the process. By presenting data, establishing a common goal (serving the citizen), and giving them a voice in what gets built, they transition from roadblocks to champions.

Counteract the tendency for the highest-paid person's opinion (HIPPO) to dominate decisions. Position all stakeholder ideas, regardless of seniority, as valid hypotheses to be tested. This makes objective data, not job titles, the ultimate arbiter for website changes, fostering a more effective culture.

Instead of developing a strategy alone and presenting it as a finished product (the 'cave' method), foster co-creation in a disarming, collaborative environment (the 'campfire'). This makes the resulting document a mechanism for alignment, ensuring stakeholders feel ownership and are motivated to implement the plan.