Stakeholders’ buy-in and support is an integral component of success for any UX project, as they translate into resources, bandwidth, and approval. However, navigating stakeholder dynamics requires a thoughtful mix of listening, collaboration, communication, influence, and negotiation. This balancing act leads to stakeholder engagement and ultimately creates successful, long-term relationships.
Engaging Stakeholders in the UX Process
Continuous communication with stakeholders is important for any UX project — first, because it helps them understand and appreciate what UX does and, second, because it helps UX learn about other essential aspects of the business. Despite this duality, the burden of communication usually falls on UX — because stakeholders are inherently busy and possibly focused on many other things besides UX.
Engaging stakeholders in the UX process usually involves several high-level activities:
- Planning: Identifying project resources and timelines, as well as gathering information about your stakeholders: who they are, when they will be involved with your project, what their constraints are
- Communicating: Disseminating information to and among stakeholders, whether synchronously or asynchronously, digitally or in person and putting expectations in place
- Aligning: Unifying stakeholders behind one decision by creating common ground
- Negotiating: Balancing of business requirements, users’ needs, and stakeholders’ interests to achieve a shared goal and mitigate risk
- Reporting: Sharing progress about the project: what has been achieved, what’s next, and obstacles along the way
- Resourcing: Advocating for required skills, people, and time, and then putting these resources in place
Stakeholder Management vs. Engagement
In recent years and across the broader industry, there has been a shift from the term stakeholder management to stakeholder engagement. While we are generally against vocabulary inflation, the premise behind this shift and our own choice to use the word engagement are worth a note.
Stakeholder management traditionally refers to a controlled, streamlined approach for overseeing stakeholders and their participation to a project. This approach typically includes identifying stakeholders, mapping their impact, and then categorizing them into buckets that dictate the best level of interaction.
Stakeholder engagement refers to a broader, context-driven approach with the end goal of building a trust-based, effective relationship with stakeholders. According to Manetti and Toccafondi, it is “a process that creates a dynamic context of interaction, mutual respect, dialog, and change, not a unilateral management of stakeholders.” Stakeholder engagement should not be a siloed process. Successful teams make it a part of everyday operations and bake it into the fabric of how they function.
The term you choose to use is not important. However, it is important to recognize that successful relationships with UX stakeholders are not the result of a blanket process, but rather a series of productive, thoughtful interactions that build trust and thus lead to positive, productive collaborations.
UX Maturity Impacts Stakeholder Engagement
Stakeholder engagement, and corresponding stakeholder obstacles, will look different depending on your company’s UX maturity. For example, at lower maturity levels (i.e., when UX is absent, limited, or just emerging), you will need to spend energy and time you not only to advocate for the work at hand, but also to educate stakeholders about the overall value of UX and of a user-centered approach.
At higher UX-maturity stages, when UX is structured and integrated into your company’s processes, you will need less time to initially engage stakeholders. However, more time may be spent balancing competing stakeholder needs and priorities.
Getting Started
A strong stakeholder-engagement strategy begins with understanding your stakeholders: who they are and what they need.
Identify Your Stakeholders
A stakeholder is any person or group that has an invested interest in your project. Ask yourself who plays a role in your project’s success. Stakeholders will either (1) have power, influence, or control over your project, or (2) will be impacted in some way by its outcome.
A stakeholders may be someone you need to work with to complete your project, someone who will use it, or even someone who is funding it. They can be internal or external to your organization and may include:
- C-suite executives
- Shareholders or board members
- Department directors
- Crossdisciplinary peers (and their managers)
- Product or project manager
- Your manager or boss
- Suppliers or partners
- Clients or customers
Some stakeholders will be easy to define, whereas others may be discovered only later in the process when an issue arises. If your list of potential stakeholders is too long, a prioritization is required to narrow it down to a set of key stakeholders.
There are a variety of methods for prioritizing stakeholders. A common method relies on a stakeholder matrix, which involves assessing each stakeholder’s potential impact (via power and interest) on your project.
Another method is based on rating candidate stakeholder across the following dimensions:
- Does the stakeholder have capacity to be involved?
- Does the stakeholder have a positive reputation amongst their peers and the broader organization?
- Can the stakeholder contribute a unique perspective and/or resources?
- Is the stakeholder a champion of user-centered processes?
- Can the project exist without the stakeholder?
The goal is to identify the critical stakeholders on whom to focus your time and resources. Think of them as a subset of key players with whom you will build relationships.
Assess Your Stakeholders’ Needs
Beyond knowing who your critical stakeholders are, you must identify what they need — their preferred level of engagement, hopes and fears for the project, potential conflicts with other stakeholders, knowledge of key issues, and so forth. Identifying stakeholder’s needs is often done through a combination of interviews and profiling.
Stakeholder interviews are one-one-one conversations stakeholders to gather business objectives, communication preferences, potential obstacles, and other project-relevant information
From here, we can create a stakeholder profile that combines insight from the stakeholder interview with additional (often historical) contextual knowledge into one artifact or document for your internal team to reference.
A stakeholder profile may include things like past engagements with them (or other meaningful historical context), their willingness to participate and engage, and tactics that worked well when engaging with them. Think of it as a persona card for your stakeholder. It is meant to capture everything your team knows about the particular stakeholder, and it should evolve over time based on your team’s interactions with that stakeholder.
Build an Engagement Plan
Once you’ve identified your critical stakeholders and their needs, you’ll want to build an engagement plan. This can be as simple and informal as outlining when and how you plan to collaborate with stakeholders and who on your team is responsible to do it.
In other cases, especially across larger teams, it may be helpful to create an in-depth document that will provide anyone joining the team (or new to interacting with the stakeholder) enough baseline knowledge to leverage the existing relationship. An individual engagement plan generally includes:
- Stakeholder name. Who is the engagement plan for (an individual stakeholder, an organization, or a stakeholder group)?
- Custodian. Who from your team is responsible for keeping in touch with the stakeholder? This will be the primary communicator with this stakeholder and own the majority of interactions with them. Ideally, each team member will be a keeper for one or two assigned stakeholders. Junior team members often act as custodians for peer stakeholders, while a senior team member or lead will marshal important, senior stakeholders.
- Engagement objective. What is the goal of your engagement with this stakeholder? Think in tangible outcomes such as increases UX resources, champions UX among peers, takes a more hands-off approach, or becomes UX-fluent?
- UX maturity. How fluent and supportive about user-centered design is this stakeholder?
- Key concerns. What is this stakeholder most worried about? Document issues, concerns, and success metrics most important to this stakeholder.
- Communication method. What are the stakeholder’s preferred communication methods? The answer can be based on what’s worked well in the past and the stakeholder interview.
- Engagement level and actions. How much do you plan on engaging this stakeholder and what strategies will you use? When possible, include tangible benchmarks or milestones tied to your project timeline. Engagement levels might include:
- Monitor: Mostly passive engagement involving primarily one-way communication from team to stakeholder
- Consult: Occasional interaction at key moments to gather perspective and reach key decision
- Involve: Active engagement at and between milestones, in a wide range of decisions
- Collaborate: Cocreation and learning alongside the stakeholder; participation in workshops or working sessions
- Empower: Direct ownership of milestones; leads engagement
These engagement plans should serve as a baseline establishing what you know about a stakeholder and how you plan to engage. Like other shared artifacts, they will evolve — both throughout the product lifecycle and as you interact with each stakeholder more.
Once you build a positive relationship with a stakeholder, an engagement plan will feel less pivotal, as your interactions will begin to feel like second nature. However, these plans still serve as important artifacts for new team members and can be used during onboarding of a new project or initiative.
Benefits of Stakeholder Engagement
Engaging with stakeholders is a requirement if we want to ship great experiences. It should be integrated with your team’s routines, tools, and methods — so that it feels sustainable and effective. By engaging stakeholders, we:
- Mitigate risk. Risk come in all shapes and sizes in product development: technical risks, financial risks, and timeline risks. Much of a stakeholder’s role is to ensure that high-level decisions are sound and will benefit the business. When we engage stakeholders early on, we can adjust our design process to mitigate risk early. For example, building a relationship with an engineering stakeholder early on allows us to uncover technical risk in a potential design when there’s still time to explore alternatives.
- Effectively manage resources. A project’s success hinges on having the appropriate resources effectively allocated. Stakeholders are often decision makers about the resources (people, time, and budget) dedicated to a given project. Thus, successful stakeholder engagement ensures that stakeholders have a realistic idea of the resources needed to complete a project and creates a productive landscape for resource negotiation and flexibility.
- Decrease potential obstacles. The more we positively engage stakeholders, the more we build trust with them. They can feel involved and heard, while contributing helpful, relevant knowledge to a project. This knowledge often includes potential obstacles and ways to avoid them: politics within the organization, technical limitations, collaboration hurdles, and market barriers. Building relationships with stakeholders increases the likelihood you’ll know about potential barriers early and, even more importantly, have their help and support in overcoming them.
- Raise expectations. Trust, the ability to handle conflict, and clear goals are key factors in the quality of a team’s output. When stakeholders are positively engaged, all parties can be held to a high standard — the team is committed to clear goals and the stakeholders can be held accountable for helping the team achieve them. This mutual accountability raises expectations and positively impacts results.
References
Giacomo Manetti and Simone Toccafondi. 2012. The Role of Stakeholders in Sustainability Reporting Assurance. Journal of Business Ethics.
