“Behind good brands lie stakeholder companies.” – Will Hutton
According to Dan Brown –
There are users — the people who will use your product.
There are collaborators — the people with whom you will build, market and sell the product.
And then there are stakeholders — the people who perhaps don’t have a clear role, but do have an interest in your work.
Stakeholder management is a discipline that helps us to improve our relationship with our stakeholders. It involves systematically identifying stakeholders; analyzing their needs and expectations; and planning future engagements with them.
In the context of Scrum, a stakeholder is anyone with a vested interest in the product who is not part of the Scrum Team. These are the people who’ll help you discover, develop, release, support and promote the product. A Product Owner has to be in constant touch with the key stakeholders to maximize the value of the product.
Why is it so Important?
As product owners, we deliver value to our end users. In Scrum, the only way to measure the success or failure of an increment is via stakeholder feedback.
For example, if after project Go-Live, a service response time is poor and you get first-hand feedback from your stakeholders, then as a Product Owner, it is an opportunity for you to put corrective measures in the upcoming sprints.
So long as the product owners and the stakeholders are heading towards a common goal, receiving input and feedback from the different stakeholders becomes easier to manage. In most cases, hearing back from various stakeholders can help outline any potential issues, risks or improvements Product Owners might have missed.
As I said in the beginning, stakeholders are not part of the core Scrum Team. That’s why sometimes stakeholders are considered free resources that can do the work for you. That’s why you, as a Product Owner, need to know how to manage them and keep them interested, how they will get involved, and what they will gain from these involvements.
How to go about it?
The process of Stakeholder management consists of the following phases:
Identifying Stakeholders
As a first step, one should have a list of all potential stakeholders. If you are joining a new team as a Product Owner, ask for the stakeholder register. This should be part of your handover checklist. Without the right set of stakeholders, decisions lack direction, priorities become unclear, and success becomes a moving target.
Once created, the list should be periodically updated and reviewed. For better accessibility, the stakeholder list (map) should be kept in a central location, such as SharePoint, OneDrive, MS Teams, or the team Confluence spaces.
Usually, identification is done towards the start of a new project. However, identification can also be done post-go-live once the service is operational. You can start the stakeholder identification process by asking the following questions in a team brainstorming session:
- Who is affected positively and negatively by the project deliveries?
- Who owns the budget and approves key investments?
- Are there external vendors or third-party services involved?
- Who are the end-users who will use this product daily?
- Which other teams do we rely upon, like security, ops, architecture, infrastructure, etc.?
- Who is in charge of assigning or procuring resources or facilities?
- Who are the key decision-makers?
- What are inter-dependencies, and who owns them?
- Are there external regulators or industry bodies that need to be considered?
Stakeholder Analysis
Once you have the stakeholder list ready, it is essential to analyze each one. Remember, if thousands of users use your application daily, you cannot examine each.
No two stakeholders will have the same interest in your project, and as a busy Product Owner, you can’t focus equally on each one. As part of the analysis step, you must categorise your stakeholders based on their interests and influence on the project.
Begin categorizing your identified stakeholders within the Power/Interest grid and develop a strategy for effectively managing them. To measure the possible influence of your stakeholders, identify their level of impact on a scale of high, medium and low:
High: Stakeholder with strong ability to impact your project i.e. high interest and high power.
Medium: Stakeholder with a significant interest in, but a lower level of power to affect the project.
Low: Stakeholder with little ability to affect the project.
Beware of the scenario where a less influential but very much interested stakeholder is promoted and becomes more influential one day.
Stakeholder Engagement Plan
Once you have identified stakeholders and categorised them according to their interests and influence, the next step is to come up with a detailed communication/engagement plan.
Like Scrum being an empirical (based on what is experienced or seen and not on theory) process, this engagement plan has to be a live document that will keep changing as and when required.
The stakeholder engagement plan consists of:
- Name of the stakeholder
- Mode of communication (meeting, email, report)
- Frequency of communication (daily, weekly, monthly, need basis)
- His current level of engagement (e.g. supportive, neutral or challenging)
- Target/desired level of engagement (supportive, neutral)
Ensure the plan is accessible to all team members. They must be aware of key stakeholders, and lack of awareness should not adversely impact product discussions.
But I don’t know my stakeholders
I recommend three things that can be helpful to start with stakeholder management:
- Every product has stakeholders. It is not ideal if you have not yet listed them or created a stakeholder list/register.
- Don’t worry — it’s never too late. Start by creating an initial stakeholder map and categorizing stakeholders according to the interest/influence framework. Then, refine the stakeholder map over time. It is recommended that it be updated once every quarter.
- Decide upon specific ways of collaborating and communicating with each group/person. Remember, if thousands of users use your product (for example, in a big enterprise), not every user is your key stakeholder. Hence, your expert judgement and insights are key in such a scenario.
Appreciate your feedback!
Keeping stakeholders informed and engaged through regular Sprint Reviews, backlog refinement sessions, or defined feedback channels allows Scrum to remain agile, responsive, and effective.
A successful Scrum team doesn’t just manage stakeholders; it collaborates with them to create lasting value.
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