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In the run-up to the 2015 US Fish and Wildlife Service (USFWS) listing decision for greater sage-grouse it is important for rangeland professionals to engage in this issue because many of the problems currently impacting sage-grouse are the same issues that define major rangeland management challenges. Here we provide some highlights and lessons learned from our engagement with a diverse stakeholder group in crafting a greater sage-grouse Candidate Conservation Agreement with Assurances (CCAA) for Harney County, Oregon. The team responsible for drafting the Harney County CCAA was a diverse group of private landowners, USFWS, science advisors, state wildlife and land management agencies, NRCS, local conservation districts, BLM, agricultural commodity groups, conservation groups, and County Government. There are two important lessons we learned working with a diverse group on sensitive issues relating to sage-grouse. First, the process should begin by asking “what is the problem” … “is this a grouse issue per se, an ecosystem issue, to what extent is it both?” By posing these difficult queries up front, our diverse group was able to focus much of its effort toward defining relationships between rangeland ecology, conservation actions, and sage-grouse habitat quality. Additionally, the issue of the bird vs. the ecosystem will likely come up at some point in the process anyway, so it is infinitely better to tackle this question up front to prevent movement in unproductive directions. A second lesson learned was discussing and agreeing upon the role of management factors in affecting sage-grouse habitat was greatly aided by the use of state-and-transition models. In fact, these relationships become almost self-evident if the models are constructed in a collaborative stepwise process. In doing so, we largely avoided protracted discussion over whether a given management factor (e.g., grazing or fire) has positive, negative, or neutral effects on sagebrush habitats.