Esra Yetis is a Product Coach with extensive experience in helping organisations navigate complexity and build impactful B2B products. Her work spans multiple industries in the private sector, including finance, fintech, logistics, and cybersecurity, for organisations such as the London Stock Exchange Group, METRO AG, WorldFirst, Motability, Snyk, Ziraat Bank and more.

Esra believes in inclusive innovation and technology that must be built with people, not just for them. She consistently champions diverse perspectives to mitigate the unintended consequences of transformation and innovation.

She values truth and good quality over convenience. In consulting, it is easy to build what a client asks for. She upholds the value of creating what people really need.

Esra believes in leaving the ladder down and empowering others to build their own capabilities. Her goal is never to create dependency on herself as a consultant, but to mentor teams and embed the skills they need to sustain change themselves. This is central to her work as a coach, where she equips teams with the mindsets to thrive independently.

The Talk

Navigating the Corporate Politics that Block Product Development

Some would argue that stakeholder management is just a soft skill. I argue that it’s the hidden operating system of product success.

In today’s product environments, PMs aren’t blocked by a lack of ideas, features, or even talent. They’re blocked by competing priorities, shifting expectations, and organizational misalignment. Stakeholders, from executives to operations, each come with their own incentives, pressures, and definitions of success. If PMs can’t navigate these tensions with clarity and influence, even the best product strategies fall flat.

This is exactly why stakeholder management should be at the center of modern product practice, as product managers aren’t just ideating or choosing the correct features to build. Yes, this is part of the job, but then what - does it mean that said features will be a success? No! To actually get the "green light" to activate their vision, they must translate their strategy, negotiate trade-offs, and advocate for outcomes in rooms where alignment doesn’t exist by default. In other words, their pitching their perspective, constantly.

Being a PM is not managing a backlog - that's the PO's.. never mind, haha. The main role of PMs (especially with the rise of artificial intelligence, which also may soon become a stakeholder itself) is to read the room, reframe the problem, and bring others with them... all while continually building trust. Stakeholder management isn’t about pleasing everyone. It’s about remembering we're in the people business, we just happen to build products.

In a time when we're seemingly confusing ai tools with the role of product management itself, and thereby prioritizing shipping "stuff" instead of serving people, stakeholder management is supremely relevant.

What You Will Learn

I want people to learn that stakeholder management is the most important part of product management and why.