Stakeholder Mapping

Purpose

Prioritize stakeholders and set engagement strategy. This skill runs two complementary grids on your identified stakeholder set and deliberately compares what they reveal, because each grid shows you something the other cannot.

Power × Interest answers: how much does each stakeholder care about this initiative, and how much can they influence it? It produces engagement strategies — who to involve deeply, who to keep informed, who to monitor. This is the grid most PMs know.

Impact × Power answers: who bears the consequences of this product's outcomes, and how much organizational power do they actually hold? It surfaces the stakeholders who matter most to get right but are most likely to be underrepresented — high impact, low power.

Running only the first grid optimizes for managing relationships with the powerful. Running only the second produces an equity analysis without an engagement plan. The insight lives in comparing them: a stakeholder who appears in "keep informed" on the first grid and "high impact, low power" on the second is someone you've been under-engaging with consequences that fall entirely on them. That's a product risk.

Use this after stakeholder-identification (which builds the full list) and before stakeholder-engagement-advisor (which plans per-stakeholder outreach).

Input

Works best with: Your identified stakeholder list (ideally from stakeholder-identification). Also useful: What you know about each person's power, interest, and current stance, plus the engagement decisions the map must drive.