<aside> ⭐ UX professionals often work hard to convince stakeholders to support UX research and design efforts. Recognizing who your key stakeholders are and how they impact your work is the first step to building fruitful stakeholder relationships.
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Ever had a stakeholder shut down your project or block UX-design efforts? This frustrating situation may be avoided. A significant part of UX involves working with and alongside stakeholders. In particular, in organizations with low UX maturity, UX professionals have to constantly evangelize to stakeholders about their work, why it matters, and why they should be allowed to continue doing it. It’s a good idea to collaborate with stakeholders and to invite them to observe research, stakeholder analysis offers a structured approach to stakeholder management.
Stakeholder analysis is particularly useful for UX professionals working on new projects with new stakeholders or for UX teams looking to improve the UX maturity of their organization by increasing the knowledge of (and adoption of) user-centered ways of working.
A stakeholder is anyone who has interest in your project or with whom you need to work with in some way to complete the project. Your CEO, the marketing director, the account manager, or even your manager could all be stakeholders. Stakeholders can be internal to the organization or external to it. If you’re not sure who your stakeholders are, start by asking yourself who is interested in your project and who has power, influence, or control over it.
Some of your stakeholders will have more impact than others, and different stakeholder-management strategies need to be applied to those influential stakeholders, compared to those that wield little influence.
Stakeholder mapping is used to perform a stakeholder analysis. There are many ways you can map stakeholders; one of the most popular mapping methods is the power-interest matrix (often referred to as Mendelow’s Matrix as the earliest version is attributed to the researcher Aubrey Mendelow).
The power-interest matrix plots stakeholders along two axes, from low- to high-power and low- to high-interest. Stakeholders fall into one of four quadrants. Each quadrant calls for a different stakeholder-management strategy.
Plotting your stakeholders on the power-interest matrix provides 4 categories of stakeholders and corresponding management strategies.
Manage closely: Stakeholders that fall in the top right quadrant are the most important; they are key stakeholders who are directly interested in your project and exert great influence over the outcome. For example, maybe they make resourcing decisions. Or, your CEO is interested in a redesign and would like to contribute with personal ideas. These stakeholders need to be managed closely; without doing so, they can advertently or inadvertently stop, hinder, or block your project. When managed well, these stakeholders can become promoters of your project, making success a likely outcome.
Keep satisfied: Stakeholders found in the top-left quadrant are referred to as latents; they currently aren’t interested in your project, but they have the power to impact your project greatly. It’s important to ensure these stakeholders are happy. If they find that your work impacts their own, they may get involved. You may want to consult with them to make sure their interests are observed.
Keep informed: Stakeholders who are interested in your project but have little power over it should be kept informed. They should be invited to research, copied into debrief emails, and invited to design critiques.
Monitor: It’s not worth spending a lot of time engaging or managing stakeholders that fall into the bottom left quadrant because they have little interest in your work or power over it. However, circumstances could change, and they could move into one of the other quadrants, and so you should monitor them regularly.