Stakeholder Telephone

ELI5 - The Vibe Check

The client tells the account manager they want a 'quick tweak.' The account manager tells the product manager it's a 'small feature.' The product manager tells engineering it's a 'simple flag.' By the time it reaches you, the requirements have mutated three times and nobody left in the chain actually knows what the client originally asked for. That's stakeholder telephone, the same distortion as the childhood game, played with your sprint.

Real Talk

Stakeholder telephone describes the progressive distortion of requirements as they pass through multiple layers of people relaying information secondhand, each paraphrasing based on their own understanding and priorities. The fix is reducing the number of intermediary layers between the requester and the implementer, or getting requirements in writing at the source rather than relayed verbally.

When You'll Hear This

"Can we get the client on the call directly? I don't trust another round of stakeholder telephone." / "By the time the ticket reached me it had been through so much stakeholder telephone it barely resembled the original ask."