Remember to demonstrate empathy and understanding for the parties involved in the situation you describe. Senior product managers often need to remain relatively neutral in times of conflict and lean on facilitation techniques and analysis to identify the most valuable solution options.

"Early in my career, I was the lead analyst for an application suite that managed the request and approval process for creative work and tracked all of the costs associated with it. My stakeholders were a mix of senior managers responsible for the development of media and senior managers responsible for financials. The creative side was focused on how quickly the solution could be used because any slow down to their process resulted in the loss of competitive advantage. The financial stakeholders were interested in assuring that the costs for every work assignment were tracked throughout the process. The requests from each side were often in conflict.

I was encouraged to work with each group separately but decided that it would be beneficial to bring them together so that they could foster a greater level of appreciation for the needs of each side. I facilitated a steering committee and was pleased to find that my clients quickly adopted a shared perspective resulting in my ability to more easily implement solutions that were understood and supported by everyone."