Mapping Your Stakeholders: A Guide to Effective Design Thinking
A main principle of Design Thinking is to think and design from the perspective of multiple stakeholders, where the user is always one of these stakeholders. In order to do this, it's essential to map out your stakeholders correctly.
After identifying your stakeholders, you can use your understanding of how humans think to act upon a user's needs and desires. Behavioural design techniques are a stepping stone towards steering user behaviour in a positive and correct way. In a previous article, we covered two of our most-loved techniques: Cialdini's 7 triggers of influence and the Hooked model. You can influence user thinking and behaviour in a structured manner by using these techniques, but there is a whole lot more to discover.
Before progressing further, it’s important to focus on stakeholder mapping. How can stakeholders be mapped effectively, and what are the key principles to consider when approaching this process, whether from a rational or more intuitive perspective?
Stakeholder Mapping to ensure the landscape is covered
The stakeholder map exercise uses concentric circles to visually organize all parties that are involved with or impacted by a value proposition. This structured approach ensures no relevant stakeholder is overlooked, whether they contribute directly, indirectly, or are affected by the outcomes.
- At the center, the Core Team circle represents individuals fully dedicated to the project, such as project managers, engineers, or designers. Their focus is the driving force behind the initiative.
- The next circle includes Involved stakeholders who provide regular input or help move the project forward, though it is not their sole focus. They ensure the project benefits from cross-functional insights.
- The Informed circle comprises stakeholders who stay updated on the project and occasionally provide feedback or input. While less involved, they can offer crucial perspectives when needed.
- The outermost circle captures To Be Informed individuals or groups who are not yet directly part of the project but need to be informed due to potential impacts or to maintain smooth operations.
By categorizing stakeholders into these layers, the map helps to systematically address their needs, influence, and potential contributions. It ensures clarity in communication, accountability, and collaboration while identifying opportunities to align stakeholders' interests with the value proposition's success.
At TPA, we emphasize two powerful exercises to further enrich the information gathered in the stakeholder mapping exercise: the Stakeholder DNA Map and the Empathy Map. These tools provide a structured yet flexible framework to understand and categorize stakeholders in a meaningful way.
Approaching the stakeholder DNA map
The stakeholder DNA map is a more analytic approach to identifying your stakeholders. How do we set up our stakeholder DNA map at TPA?
- Start by figuring out the stakeholder's demographic and what their main characteristics are.
- Define the pains and gains the stakeholder has towards either the whole topic (if you're at the beginning of the product development process) or the solution your product will provide (which you will need to play into).
- Describe the jobs to be done. What jobs does the stakeholder have to complete to get to the predefined end goal?
- Determine the bias a stakeholder might have towards the value proposition.
- If there's time left and the topic requires this information, our stakeholder DNA poster has room to describe the communication channels, as well as the positive and negative links towards this stakeholder. This is good preparation to set up a potential marketing campaign.
By filling out the stakeholder DNA map, you can obtain a clear picture of how and why a stakeholder will take most of their rational actions through the jobs to be done, and how these can be influenced by irrational emotion from pains and gains.
Understanding the empathy map
As the name implies, the empathy map helps us to figure out more intrinsic values about the end user. It consists of two big parts:
User observation – via pre-observation or assumptions. If you have pre-observations, ask yourself these questions: What does the user see, hear, think and feel, say and do about the product or concept? If you are determining elements out of assumptions, you will of course need to test these assumptions through user testing.
Analysis of the pains and gains derived from observations/assumptions made, in the same way as described in the stakeholder DNA map.
In contrast to the stakeholder DNA map, the empathy map has a greater focus on how or what a stakeholder might feel or come to expect. As such, the empathy map aids us better in building intuitive flows towards the user.
What comes next?
Once you've completed your stakeholder mapping, the next step is to either build a product that fits the needs of the stakeholder or to steer the stakeholder's behaviour towards using the product. As mentioned in the introduction, you can positively shape a user's behaviour using Cialdini's 7 triggers of influence or the Hooked model.
Now that you know more about what a stakeholder does, our next article will dive deeper into other behavioural design techniques to influence stakeholders. Want to know them now before everyone else? Contact us!
