Stakeholders: who they are, how to identify them and why their engagement matters

How to open the right doors?

Stakeholders are key influencers in determining the success of projects and products. But how would you know if you’re knocking at the right door?

Some words carry much more meaning when kept in their original language: "stakeholder" is one of these. However, generalizations can sometimes create confusion about who they really are and how one should engage with them.

In this article, we will explore who stakeholders are, how to identify them, and why it's important to learn how to manage relationships, or better to say, ho to build relationships with them. Will all this inspire your team?

Let's find out.

What do we mean by stakeholders?

Stakeholders are those who can influence what you are working on or be influenced by it. They hold decision-making power, economic interest and product usage. Stakeholders can be internal to your organization (belonging to different fields as engineering, sales, marketing), but they can also be external (just like customers and end-users).

Here is a hint on how to identify them with a workshop.

Let's say you've already created the team and you are at the beginning of a project.

Identifying stakeholders is one of the tasks you will have to accomplish with your team, here is a few steps to start with.

Organize a workshop, involve the team, and anyone else you consider to be necessary and provide useful material like post-it notes or similar tools. You can hold it in-person, but remotely is also fine.

Consider that, in the following steps, it will be vital to ensure a very first solo phase where individuals work independently before coming together to share their ideas or work. In the context of a workshop or team activity, the solo phase allows participants to generate ideas, solutions, or insights on their own without being influenced by others. This can lead to a wider variety of ideas and prevent group thinking.

After the solo phase, participants typically come together to discuss and refine their ideas in a collaborative setting.

Step 1: Create a List

Invite participants to reflect on who the stakeholders are using the following guiding questions:

• Who is investing in the development?
• Who will benefit from using the product?
• Who can support its realization, and who is holding it back?
• Who has already been involved in similar initiatives in the past?

Cluster into groups and subgroups as necessary.

Step 2: Go Deeper

Every stakeholder has different characteristics and needs. Each of them offers a perspective that must be balanced with others. While it may be tempting to engage with every single stakeholder in your organization right away, it's more effective to prioritize the most critical relationships. This approach ensures that your efforts are concentrated on the stakeholders who matter the most, maximizing your impact.

For each stakeholder, try and ask the following questions:

• What is their role and what are their expectations?
• What are their issues and needs?
• In case your product is successful, what behaviors will change?

Step 3: Matrix Mapping

Reorganize the profiles on a matrix based on two indicators:

• Level of Influence: The power to influence the development process. This can be direct (e.g., a C-level executive) or indirect (e.g., an important customer or partner).
• Level of Interest: The degree of interest in solving a problem, improving a condition, or meeting a need.

Stakeholders are now grouped into four quadrants representing different levels of relationship with the project/product:

• High Power, High Interest = Promoters
• Low Power, High Interest = Defenders
• High Power, Low Interest = Latent
• Low Power, Low Interest = Marginal

Step 4: Discuss Engagement Strategies

Open a discussion and agree with the team on strategies to engage stakeholders based on the transparency achieved so far.

Try and ask the following questions:

• Who needs to be informed: when should I inform him/her? What should I inform him/her about?
• Who needs to be consulted: when should I consult him/her? What should I consult him/her on?
• Who needs to be involved: what should I involve him/her on? when should I involve him/her?

Here, priorities start to emerge more clearly. As you can imagine, you will engage Promoters and Defenders more than Marginals. Additionally, a strategy to consider might be how to involve a Latent stakeholder to increase their interest and turn them into a Promoter, gaining another important sponsor for your project.

Conclusion

At the end of the workshop, bring all the pieces together and gather final impressions. How did everyone feel about the time spent together?

Your organization’s relationships with stakeholders will evolve over time, presenting various challenges of different complexities. By mastering the identification of key influencers and conducting pre-assessment checks before engaging with them, you can facilitate productive discussions and cultivate deeper relationships.

Investing in such a workshop brings significant benefits. The first three that I always notice are:

1. Awareness and alignment: this happens within teams and across multiple organizations when involved.
2. Team motivation: people feel more engaged and better understand stakeholders and their expectations.
3. Communication strategy: it's much more clear how to approach stakeholders based on their needs and project requirements as a team.

Why early Stakeholder engagement is vital for project success

Along this journey with your team, Stakeholders have been identified and mapped, their roles in relation to the product have been acknowledged, and their engagement has been prioritized.

From now on their engagement is essential: succeeding with Stakeholder engagement sets the beginning of everything that will happen and determines the success of an initiative.

Those sponsoring the project won’t always be able to provide you with all the answers, and their expectations today might not be the same tomorrow. Defining measurable goals for success through an initiative can be challenging.

This scenario is increasingly common.

Therefore, I see engagement less as "showing or informing about a decision made by someone else" and more as "actively involving you in a process to build the project/product together".

The first pattern often portrays environments characterized by separate domains of responsibility (silos) that do not collaborate well. Short iterations of engagement may be less effective, leading to potential disappointment when expectations, which may have evolved, are not met.

The second involves engagement from the very beginning. It leans towards an approach where expectations are explored and anticipated, allowing for the identification and creation of value that may not be initially clear.

But what are the three ingredients to enhance and boost this type of engagement?

1. Common language: collaboratively reasoning, listening, and understanding viewpoints gradually creates a common language that facilitates conversations.
2. Co-design: collaborative processes and targeted workshops explore contexts, problems, define solutions, and make decisions. Involve those who need to be involved.
3. Vision: make it clear or seek clarity if it's unknown. It provides direction, ensuring everyone understands what they're doing and, more significantly, the reason why they're doing it.

Building a chain of relationships, trust, and transparency among all parties fosters a sense of understanding, involvement, and satisfaction in their contributions.

COLLABORATION - TRUST - TRANSPARENCY

Getting to listen to some teams, in some cases, makes me understand that the sensation is quite similar: as if there is a distinct "us" very far and distinct from "them", meaning that those who "develop" belong to one side and those who "make requests" to another. Easily distinguishable in those who "execute" and those who "decide".

Does any of this help drive us toward a common direction? Not in my opinion. On the contrary, fostering engagement through a solid relationship between teams and stakeholders, does.

The product being developed or engineered is not just a standalone item; it is part of a larger framework where it needs to meet certain objectives and fit into the overall business plan.

To make it simple, the development of the product is directly tied to the business's goals and strategic direction. Once the product is developed, it needs to be marketed and sold to customers. Marketing campaigns are designed to promote the product, attract users, and persuade them to purchase it. Additionally, the product's success ultimately depends on how well it meets the needs and expectations of its users once it is in their hands. Product development is interconnected with business goals, marketing efforts, and user satisfaction. The product's journey starts from being engineered to fulfilling strategic objectives, being marketed effectively, and finally meeting user needs.