Stakeholders&Stakeholders
Aug 1, 2023
Best practices
“To keep everyone invested in your vision, you have to back up a little bit and really analyze who the different stakeholders are and what they individually respond to.”
— Alan Stern
In this article, I aim to address the crucial aspect of daily design work, which is communication with stakeholders and ensuring they are kept in the loop. At the beginning of this article, I have more questions than answers, so I invite you to do this research and discovery together to find a strategy.
The second step for proper research after selecting the topic, as epidemicsound.com recommends, is “Developing the idea and gathering data”. The idea I try to follow is how to communicate better with key people? How to make sure I understand their goals correctly? How to know with whom to keep more contact, and with whom less?
We will tackle these questions one by one.
How to communicate better with key people?
By key people I mean stakeholders, of course. Let’s start with definitions first.
“Stakeholders have an interest in the success of the project and can be within or outside the organization that’s sponsoring the project. Stakeholders are important because they can have a positive or negative influence on the project with their decisions. There are also critical or key stakeholders, whose support is needed for the project to exist.” - ProjectManager.com
“Stakeholders are people, groups, or individuals who have the power to either affect or be affected by the design project you're involved in.” – interaction-design.org
These definitions provide us with a better understanding of our relationship with stakeholders, which is mutual. We strive for their success, while they can also support our initiatives and become our allies. What are the examples of stakeholders? In the design domain, of course.
Clients/Customers: the pool of individuals who have hired your company, team, or you are considered Leads. The situation becomes more complicated when there is a main individual who hired your company, as well as additional local leads with whom you are directly involved in a project – you have to balance these priorities.
Product Managers: despite the fact that Product Managers are expected to have more design thinking, sometimes you may get unlucky and have this stakeholder pretty conservative, and also keep in mind global design vision at the same time. Or maybe things are simpler for you and that’s good.
Designers: your team! Yes, you want them as an ally. Especially the Design system team, if you know you know.
Users: we are designing for users since we are their voice! It’s a constant balance to include our users in designs, minding business objectives at the same time. However, we do not usually map this group.
Domain experts/SME: same as with users, but with more nuances in cooperation. This could be a great source of knowledge, but also check if this person is more conservative or open to designing experiences differently from what they know.
Development/Engineering Team: you know the drill. Your designs and ideas will be implemented by these people so it’s good to keep in mind them and possible product limitations.
Business Executives: most of the time those will be covered by Client/Customer Leads, but it’s always important to know this agenda. It may help you in supporting your Leads better.
At this given moment it’s good to start collecting all the stakeholders you have within your product or project, or more globally in a table, for example. At my current company, we started tracking stakeholders, associated products, and how often & who communicates with them in Google Sheets.
But sometimes when you do this – you are left with a huge list of people to keep in mind. It is impossible to do it all at once, so we may need to know now who needs more attention. Calls, messages, newsletter, weekly, daily – you name it.
How to know with whom to keep more contact, and with whom less? How to make sure I understand stakeholders’ goals correctly?
This would probably be the perfect time to start prioritizing the stakeholders you’re working with. Most of the sources I went through refer to the influence-interest matrix method.
From abacademies.org we can learn that Stakeholders may have next interests:
Economics (ex., proper compensation package for workers, attracting more customers);
Social amendment (ex., social climate, work culture);
Work (ex., involving staff in decision-making);
Time (ex., relief programs for caregivers, meeting deadlines);
Environment (ex., market state, global economy state);
Safety and security (ex., work safety initiatives);
Physical & mental health (ex., day offs monitoring).
To be able to define these interests, I like the list of questions that may help you understand each of your stakeholders more from mindtools.com:
What financial or emotional interest do they have in the outcome of your work? Is it positive or negative?
What motivates them most of all?
What information do they want from you, and what is the best way of communicating with them?
What is their current opinion of your work? Is it based on good information?
Who influences their opinions generally, and who influences their opinion of you? Do some of these influencers, therefore, become important stakeholders in their own right?
Our main goal is to help our stakeholders achieve their goals because this way we achieve our goals too. This also helps us to answer my “How to make sure I understand their goals correctly?” question above. Basically have 1-on-1s to learn more about the person in front of you.
Now over to the power axis. From policy-powertools.org we see that: “Stakeholder power can be understood as the extent to which stakeholders are able to persuade or coerce others into making decisions, and following certain courses of action.”
By the way, I highly recommend you visit the link above since it contains absolutely stunning work on stakeholder analysis. From there we learn a variety of power stakeholders’ levels and purposes:
Broad-level strategic process - to scope, build momentum and monitor a process;
Institution or business - to examine the health of an organization and plan changes;
Project or program – to design, steer and monitor a project;
Particular decision – to predict the consequences of a decision, and plan to deal with them.
This list illustrates levels from the highest scope to the most project-based one. Please mind that stakeholders may hold multiple levels all at once. For me, this list is probably the most useful one because it helps to build communication around more global processes with certain stakeholders, and really down to work with others.
To answer my question, I would say those project-related things should be communicated most often, sometimes daily during the design and development stages, when more global things tend to require much more time so the communication here can be managed on a weekly/bi-weekly basis.
If we back to the matrix itself, here is the last bit of info from interaction-design.org that we should keep in mind based on which quadrant your stakeholder belongs to:
Manage Closely: greatest efforts to satisfy these stakeholders during the design process;
Keep Satisfied: put in enough effort that they remain satisfied, yet take care not to overdo it;
Keep Informed: keep them adequately informed of what’s going on;
Monitor: don’t bother them with excessive communication; it’s a waste of your time.
And bonus thing to think about building relationships with stakeholders from the same source:
How can you win over their support?
If that doesn't work, how will you manage their opposition?
Who else might be influenced by their (negative) opinions?
Because despite interest and power matrix, you sometimes may find yourself in situations where the personal agenda of certain people may actually harm your project and processes, so you may build a separate strategy of keeping them in the loop but still try to win support from counterparts to sustain highly quality work. I would highlight that in the stakeholders’ table with influence reputation, which may be lower or higher. It’s not me taking inspiration from the Sims 4 reputation matter, no.
Summary
Talk with stakeholders and asks them specific questions to learn more about their interests. Also map them accordingly to the level of their power based on how globally they tend to work across the company or project, the more granular it is, the more constant communication it may require. And based on my experience at my current company having a table with key contacts, how of you talk with them, what products/level they are responsible for, and who is the contact person/people within your company who communicates with this stakeholder – is really helpful. Bonus if you regularly collect NPS from them and mark their reputation.