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Managing stakeholders on a team with strong opinions
Stakeholder analysis allows you to figure out how to approach a team with strong opinions
Sometimes, it’s not just the Highest Paid Person’s Opinion (HiPPO) you must watch out for.
When you design for long enough, eventually, you’ll find yourself on a team with strong opinions about the design. These team members may often have conflicting opinions that could pull your design in multiple ways.
So who exactly do you listen to in these cases? I used to be pretty awful at this as a Junior UX Designer. I’d wait on the sidelines for the team to argue, letting them determine the details before designing what somebody asked me to.
However, working on teams as a Senior Product Designer for over a decade has exposed me to various personalities and decision-making styles. You can’t always stand by and wait, especially if the final decision ignores user needs for the loudest person in the room.
If you’ve ever encountered this situation from your stakeholders, follow a simple mantra: “When in doubt, map your stakeholders out.”
Stakeholder Mapping and what it offers you
Stakeholder mapping is a project management technique for determining who your stakeholders are and how involved they may be in your work.
While this is sometimes done as a team, it’s more common for designers to use this internally with other designers to think about their stakeholders. For example, Designers working with multiple Product Managers on different project features may want to use Stakeholder Analysis to understand a unified strategy they should employ for interacting across teams.
It can start by simply brainstorming a list of your stakeholders, but once you do, you can then organize them in one of two ways:
- Bullseye (concentric circles) template
- Grid Template
Here’s how you can use both of them.
The Bullseye template: Grouping by priority
While this is typically used for smaller projects and fewer stakeholders, this can be a…
