When stakeholder buy-in is worth the effort

Teams tend to reach for this after something has already gone wrong. Stakeholder buy-in is not free, and pretending otherwise leads to bad decisions.

Strategy work is mostly deciding what not to do, and writing it down so it stays decided. Write the reasoning down alongside the decision, because the reasoning is what changes first.

When it is worth it

Late objections cost the most. There is a version of this that is over-engineered, and it is worth avoiding. Anything you cannot measure here, you are deciding by taste, which is fine as long as everyone knows it.

When it is not

If nothing downstream depends on it and nobody is complaining, it can wait. The reasoning matters more than the rule, because the rule has exceptions.

How to decide

Frame decisions in their terms, not in design terms. It is worth being explicit about, because assumptions differ quietly. Check it against what you would want a competitor's site to get wrong.

The short version

The projects that go badly are rarely the ones with the hardest technical problems. Three things worth confirming about stakeholder buy-in before you move on:

• Someone can say what the current setup is without going to look
• Involve the sceptics early rather than presenting to them — and you know whether that is true here
• There is a way to tell whether the last change to this helped

Most of the value here comes from doing the first two things, not all of them.