Keeping track of key stakeholders and their interests

Overview

Balancing stakeholder needs is one of the most complex aspects of product management, given that stakeholders often have diverse, and sometimes conflicting, interests. Product teams must navigate these dynamics while remaining aligned with the product vision and overall business goals.

Result

Our Product Ops Assistant will collaborate with your team to develop a stakeholder map that visually categorizes and prioritizes stakeholders based on their influence and interests. Along with this map, the team will create a flexible action plan for engaging each stakeholder. This proactive approach simplifies balancing stakeholder demands, fosters better relationships, and ultimately leads to happier stakeholders.

Share playbook

Process

Identify stakeholders

Product Ops Assistant & Product Leader

Meet to discuss your team’s current goals around stakeholder management. Consider whether you are looking to keep better track of your stakeholders and their interests related to all your team’s products and projects, or whether you are kicking off a new project and looking to map out the stakeholders for the project.

Create a rough list of all of the appropriate stakeholders you can think of, documenting their roles and relationship with your team.

Use the Stakeholder Analysis template from Notion to help identify potential stakeholders - focus on the questions in the section titled “How to identify a project’s stakeholder?”.

Plan a stakeholder workshop

Product Ops Assistant & Product Leader

Discuss organizing a workshop where the product team can collaboratively create a stakeholder map and develop a concrete action plan for managing relationships with each stakeholder.

The Discovery Tools Template from Miro provides a Stakeholder Management section, which you can use to plan and facilitate your workshop.

Invite the product team to the workshop

Product Ops Assistant

Send an invitation to the team for the stakeholder workshop, outlining the goals and providing the draft list of stakeholders. Ask the team to brainstorm additional stakeholders and share key questions from the Stakeholder Analysis template to help guide their thinking. Create a collaborative space that includes the exercises from the Discovery Tools Template that previews the workshop activities.

Hold the workshop

Product Ops Assistant

Prepare for the workshop by organizing stakeholder names onto digital post-it notes in Miro (or another tool) and including any newly identified stakeholders.

Product Ops Assistant, Product Leader & Team

Begin the workshop by discussing the importance of stakeholder management and any challenges the team has faced. Collaboratively map stakeholders by categorizing them based on their influence (high vs. low) and attitude (champion vs. detractor). Consider their financial investment, decision-making power, expertise, and the project's potential impact on them. Then, create an actionable plan for each stakeholder by addressing key questions from the Discovery Tools Template.

Distribute workshop summary and stakeholder database

Product Ops Assistant

After the workshop, share a summary with the team, including the finalized stakeholder map and the action plan for managing each stakeholder. Transfer the information to a living stakeholder database that can be updated over time. This database should include influence levels, champion/detractor status, action plans, and space for ongoing notes. Additionally, designate which stakeholders should receive specific communications, such as those covered in the following playbooks:

Communicating roadmap changes to stakeholders
Developing a communication plan for product updates
Coordinating internal and external communication about the launch‍‍

Notion offers useful templates which can streamline this tracking process: Stakeholder Engagement Plan, Productboard’s Stakeholder & Org Management Template, The Stakeholder Mapper.

Ongoing use and updates

Product Ops Assistant

Encourage the team to use the tracker as they engage with stakeholders through regular interactions such as meetings, surveys, and workshops. Team members should update the tracker with new insights into stakeholder goals, concerns, and preferences, which may require adjustments to the action plan.

Product Ops Assistant

Regularly review the stakeholder tracker and update action plans based on new information. If particular stakeholders pose challenges, consider hosting a dedicated workshop to create empathy maps for those individuals and refine your strategies accordingly.

Miro’s Empathy Map for Stakeholders template can be particularly helpful for this deeper understanding.