In FMCG, Stakeholder Management Isn't a Soft Skill
In FMCG, Stakeholder Management Isn't a Soft Skill
When I list my skills, stakeholder management sits next to product management and FMCG, and I mean it literally, not as filler. In a company the size of Unilever, the difference between a product that ships and one that stalls is almost never the build. It's whether the six people who need to agree actually agree, and whether they agree about the same thing.
"Alignment" usually means nobody has said the hard part out loud
Most meetings that end in agreement haven't produced alignment. They've produced a sentence everyone can interpret in their own favour. Ops heard one thing, the business team heard another, engineering heard a third, and all three left satisfied.
I've learned to be the annoying person who closes that gap in the room. Write the decision down. Read it back. Ask each person what it means for their next two weeks. If the answers don't fit together, the disagreement was always there, you've just found it now instead of in UAT.
Different stakeholders optimise for different things, and that's correct
Business teams optimise for the commercial outcome. Ops optimises for what they'll have to live with every day after launch. Engineering optimises for what they'll have to maintain. None of these is wrong, and a PM who treats one of them as an obstacle is just picking a side.
My job is to make the trade-off visible rather than resolve it privately. When ops raises a concern that costs the business team two weeks, that's not friction to manage around. That's information about the real cost of the plan.
Coming from engineering helped more than I expected
Having been on the delivery side, I know exactly how a commitment made in a room I wasn't in feels when it lands on my sprint. So I try never to be the person who makes that commitment.
If I'm going to promise something on behalf of a team, the team has seen it first. That single habit has bought me more credibility than any framework I learned at XLRI.
The uncomfortable truth
You can write an excellent requirements document and still fail because someone senior was never brought along. That felt unfair to me when I moved into product from engineering, where the work mostly spoke for itself.
It isn't unfair. It's the actual shape of the job in a large organisation. Getting people to a shared understanding *is* the product work. Everything else is downstream of it.
Swathi skipped presentations and built real AI products.
Swathi Chandrasekaran was part of the June 2026 cohort at Curious PM, alongside 20 other talented participants.