Framework for mapping & communicating with stakeholders

Why this post?

While transitioning from an individual contributor to a leadership role, your perspective would change from “How do I make an impact?”, “how do I leverage others’ expertise to make an outsized impact?”. So, at leadership levels, the importance of stakeholders increases multifold. Given this importance, a leader needs to meticulously assess each stakeholder in multiple dimensions and align everyone to achieve the common goals of the company.  This post is about how to go about this.

To get the best out of this article, I recommend doing this exercise (with a pen and paper or notion) as you read along. Alternatively, you can save this post and do this exercise in the future.

Step 1: List down all your stakeholders. 

Few pointers here to ensure you are not missing all the relevant ones – 

1. List both upstream and downstream stakeholders. Upstream ones are business teams, operations, executives whose inputs/decisions influence your work (i.e.roadmap/vision/features). Downstream teams are ones that use your inputs/decisions for their work. Dev, QA, design,support etc would be your downstream teams.  
2. If you are working with stakeholder X, consider including X’s manager to the list. Decide based on how important your/your team’s work is to X’s manager.
3. Include stakeholders who you need to talk to to get high quality feedback about the PMs under you. 
4. There might be stakeholders without a working relationship but may have influence on the management (e.g. long timers, early employees) or have a say in the appraisal process (e.g. HR). Include them as well. 

Step 2: Expectation & scoring each stakeholder

1. Write down what each stakeholder expects from you? 
2. What do you expect from each of the stakeholders? 
3. For each of the following parameters, rate each of the stakeholders identified in the previous step. Use either 1 to 10 scale or High/Medium/Low scale to rate. 

1. Goal dependency: How much does achieving your/your team’s goals depend on this stakeholder (e.g. engineering, design, QA, research etc would score very high).  
2. Difficulty: How tough is it to handle this stakeholder? Recall aspects like – saying too many ‘No’s, hard to convince personality, not turning up for crucial discussions, poor delivery etc to decide how tough is this stakeholder to handle. 
3. Influence: How much influence does this stakeholder have on others/management? You need to observe meetings, chat/mail threads to know the influence level of each stakeholder. 

Step 3: Rank the stakeholders 

Add up the three ratings for each of the stakeholders and have a score for each one. Rank the stakeholders based on the scores. 

Sample stakeholder mapping:

Stakeholder	What do they expect from me/my team?	What do I expect from them?	Goal dependency	Difficulty	Influence	Score
Engineering Director	High quality specsPredictable roadmapClear vision & strategy appreciate & evangelize engineering work Being supportive of platform goals	Timely & quality delivery fast responsiveness on customer issues in production	9	5	5	19
Engg VP	Product vision & strategy good feedback from his/her engineering team supportive of platform goals	Hire & allocate great engineers at the right time design & build a scalable infra with strong tech metrics	7	3	8	18
QA Lead	High quality specs100% use cases covered in specs	Ensuring high-quality product to production	8	3	6	17
QA Head
Design Head
BU Head
Chief of Staff to CEO
Analytics manager
Finance Head
HR Head
Customer Support lead
Customer Support Head
Operations Head
Peer-1 in product
Peer-2 in product

Step 4: Plan of action using this data: 

With (1) in step 2, you would know what to expect from each stakeholder and evaluate their contribution against expectations. This would help keep them accountable. 

With (2) in step 2, you can work on yourself and your team to meet the expectations of the stakeholders. 

You will use the scores to prioritize the time you spend with stakeholders, as simple as – Higher the total score, the more work/time/communication you have with that stakeholder. 

Scenarios based on scores: 

Stakeholders who have high scores in goal dependency but low scores in difficulty are people who are very collaborative in nature. You would want to keep them informed ( a weekly product update would do) and check in with them once in a month through a short and recurring 1:1. The frequency needs to increase if they are not able to meet your delivery expectations (or vice versa) to check in if you can help them out somewhere. 

Stakeholders who have low scores in goal dependency but high scores in influence need to be evangelized. You can share important updates, exciting stuff with them once in a while. You may also consider catching up with the stakeholder once in a month or in two months for general discussion and getting feedback. 

Stakeholders with high scores in goal dependency and difficulty need to be aligned. You should have a weekly (preferred) or biweekly catch-up with them.  

You may consider general update meetings where you can cover common elements that you want to discuss with different stakeholders in a single meeting. However, they are not always a replacement for personalized 1:1 discussions. 

Representation of action to take based on scores: 

Goal dependency	Difficulty	Influence	Action
High	High	Any	Align them
High	Low	Any	Keep informed & align whenever you see gaps
Low	Any	High	Evangelize
Low	Any	Low	Keep informed

What to do in the 1:1s: Alignment

In summary, 1:1s is to align a stakeholder. Consider some of the following to get the required alignment – 

Seek feedback – Get feedback about your team, your leadership, etc. 

Vision & Strategy – Ask them if they are clear and completely sold on your vision & strategy. Use this discussion to clarify and/or sell your vision. 

Understand their motives, goals, and challenges (use active listening instead of listening to respond). 

Identify differences in opinions/understanding and plan to reconcile them (either during the meeting or later)

Identify opportunities where you can help them and where they can help you 

Get to know more about each other as individuals 

What not to do in 1:1s:

Discussing project-related stuff can be avoided altogether since they are being discussed in other numerous meetings and day-to-day interactions. 

Conclusion:

Most often than not –  disagreements, stalemates, lack of progress, inadequate resourcing, etc are all symptoms of lack of alignment with the stakeholders. Planning the strategy & allocating time to handle each of your stakeholders can save you a lot of your effort and energy on a day-to-day execution in addition to helping you move fast on your goals. 

Previous posts on stakeholder management that led to this framework -> 1, 2, 3, 4, 5 and 6