Stakeholder Map

1 Who?

With your team, come up with the different stakeholders for your project. You can either do this by having everyone write stakeholders on sticky notes by themselves or by comparing them.

Think about the following roles stakeholders can have for your project:

But also:

Some of these might not be obvious. Why is a ‘user’ different from a ‘budget-holder’? Well, if you’re developing a simple business-to-consumer app, the same person may hold both roles. The same person decides to purchase the app, pays for it, and then uses it. But for more complex situations, usually for B2B propositions, that’s not the case. A manager might recommend buying your product to their manager, who then has to go to procurement to secure the funds, so that the manager’s team member can finally use the product. All these stakeholders need to be convinced that agreeing is a good idea, and they all decide for their own reasons.

Once you’re ready, have team members stick the stakeholders on the canvas one by one. We’ll discuss the various stakeholders in the next step, but make sure you have the following aspects noted down for each stakeholder

Tip! Use different color sticky notes for different types of stakeholders, e.g. internal vs external, different business units, hierarchy levels, or different roles. The key in color coding is to choose a coding that you expect will bring a valuable visual grouping to the map that you can use later to quickly see patterns.

Stakeholders on the Stakeholder Map

2 What? How? Why?

For each stakeholder, try to find two reasons for them to support the startup, and two reasons to be against it. Write these on two different color sticky notes(suggestion: green for positive, red for negative) and stick them next to the appropriate name. Then, write one sticky note with their own immediate goal (color suggestion: yellow) and stick it at the end.

The reasons they might have to support the product or service or not can be various. Think of the following:

If you don’t know exactly what a stakeholder’s agenda is, that is fine - you can make an educated guess now, as long as you are absolutely committed to find out the truth. Using the quadrants, it makes sense to focus on your relationships with the top-right high-influence, high-interest stakeholders first, and then work your way through the rest.

Use the Persona Canvas to map out the most important stakeholders and gather information on how they make their decisions, what their ambitions are, etc. These personas can be developed over time and are a great source of information. (Remember to be discreet and ethical in what you research and what information you store on your stakeholders!)

Figure out how you might best communicate with the stakeholders. A useful way to categorise the communication strategies you might have with your stakeholders is the following:

The example below gives a starting point on what might be a good strategy to communicate with stakeholders in different quadrants in your stakeholder map, but of course you are completely free to decide otherwise.

Engagement strategies on the Stakeholder Map

3 Connect the dots

Think of your stakeholder map as a network. Unlocking the network aspect can give you a leg up on your innovation journey.

To do that, try to figure out how the stakeholders work together. Ask questions such as:

Using color coding and linking the stakeholders together in your map will help you see the pattern. Simply connect the sticky notes with a line or use pins and strings like a 1960s super villain in a Bond movie.

The Stakeholder Map as a network

Once you have mapped out the different connections, it might make sense to also map out what is being communicated over these connections. What is the sentiment? A nice way to do this is to use emojis. In the example below they are printed, but you can easily draw them on sticky notes.

Visualising the connections between stakeholders

The example shown here immediately gives more insight. It depicts the stakeholder map for a startup that is in trouble. Although internally everything seems fine (as can be gauged from the emojis labeling the connections within the team and the connection to the CEO) the users are not happy. Somehow they fail to communicate the full force of that to the team, but they apparently do have a link to the media, and love to post negative comments. This gives the investor the impression that the platform is on fire, which impacts her relationship with the CEO. The CEO is forced to make apologetic statements to the press, which doesn’t help.

This picture is a snapshot of the situation, and can be used to come up with ideas to ‘fix’ it. What if you could create a direct link between the team and the media and use positive PR? What if you could make the users much more happy? What if you could convince the investor that all is well? What if you could give users more influence over the product (i.e. move them more to the right in the diagram)?

This simple example shows the power of a networked stakeholder map.

4 Next Steps

In order to really understand your stakeholders and share that understanding within a team, a great thing to do is to create personas [LINK] for your key stakeholders.

Another thing you might do with your stakeholder map is to organize it in the form of a timeline or sequence, where you figure out how you can ‘hop’ from one stakeholder to the next in order to win them over to your idea. On the timeline you can also plot key moments that will influence your stakeholders that you can see coming. For example, if you know your investor wants to see the quarterly results, and they are not positive, you can see that coming and possibly preempt negative fallout by communicating about it early.

Understand that your stakeholder map is in flux, over time stakeholders and their points of view change. Keep revisiting it to figure out what the most likely scenarios will be, especially before important decisions.

Figure out which stakeholders to inform, consult, involve, collaborate with, or empower, and set up a communication strategy that achieves that.