A stakeholder is anyone who has interest in your project or with whom you need to work with in some way to complete the project. Understanding your stakeholders and their perspectives is key to your project’s success and is commonly done through stakeholder interviews.
Definition: A stakeholder interview is a conversation with a person who has a vested interested in a project with a goal of gathering insights to drive the project’s success.
In a user interview, a researcher asks a user questions about a topic of interest (e.g., use of a system, behaviors and habits) with the goal of learning about that topic. Similarly, in a stakeholder interview, the UX team member asks an internal or external stakeholders questions meant to shape the design process, define success metrics, and ultimately meet their expectations.
Why Do a Stakeholder Interview?
Stakeholder interviews drive successful stakeholder engagement and give us an understanding of our project’s landscape. This understanding can help us navigate obstacles before they arise and keep everyone engaged and supportive.
Stakeholder interviews help us:
- Gather context and history. Every project comes with history: the origin of the project, known constraints, solutions tried before. If you work in a large organization, there is almost always politics at play. Stakeholder interviews can help us uncover and organize contextual variables and historical baggage that accompanies a project, prior to kickstarting it. Having this knowledge upfront will often lead to a more robust design process, save time, and avoid friction.
- Identify business goals. As UX practitioners, we focus on our users and their needs. In contrast, our stakeholders focus on the business and its needs. Stakeholder interviews can provide us with data and insights about business problems and can pinpoint business objectives and key results. This knowledge ensures that you track the right metrics to prove project success, both from the business’s and users’ point of view.
- Align on a shared vision. Understanding your stakeholders’ vision, beyond success metrics, is another benefit of stakeholder interviews. You can assess where it differs from your own vision, then align on a shared, collaborative vision for your work and the initiative at large.
- Increase buy-in and communication. Ultimately, stakeholder interviews help stakeholders feel heard. They make them more likely to buy into the project and its output. They also help establish an open communication channel throughout the design process.
When Should You Do Them?
It’s never too late for a stakeholder interview; however, the earlier in the process you can speak to stakeholders, the better. Ideally, stakeholder interviews kick off a project or initiative, welcome a new stakeholder, or offer a reset when something goes awry. The benefit of doing them early in the engagement process is two-fold: the stakeholder feels heard and you gather insight when it’s most helpful.
How to Conduct a Stakeholder Interview
Set a Goal
Similar to a user interview, you’ll want to set a goal for your stakeholder interview. What are you hoping to learn from the stakeholder? What are they uniquely positioned to help with? A concrete goal for the interview will provide structure to your interview.
Your goal can range from to obtaining knowledge to securing their support or identifying their communication preferences. Some examples of goals include:
- Identifying potential concerns or obstacles
- Assessing technological limitations and previous explorations
- Understanding competitors and potential market challenges
- Outlining communication and involvement preferences
- Establishing buy-in and support
- Signing them on as a project champion
- Creating shared success metrics
Prepare Questions
There are three types of interviews: unstructured, semistructured, and structured. Stakeholder interviews are most often semistructured: instead of a script (which is used in structured interviews), you will use a discussion guide that provides direction but doesn’t need to be followed precisely.
Preparing a guide for your stakeholder interview ensures that your questions and topics are relevant to your interview goal. A good interview guide paves the way for a deep, free-flowing conversation. Use your interview goal to outline high-level topics to cover. If you’re not sure where to start, we recommend questions that cover these four high-level topics:
- Success metrics: what success looks like, tangibly, in their eyes
- Priorities: what they know or hear from users or customers and want to address
- History and expertise: questions that target their unique perspective or role
- Process and workflow: how they want to be kept in the loop
From here, using your high-level topics as a guide, create a rough list of questions to ask your stakeholder. Below is an example we often start with, then adjust depending on the stakeholder and their role or expertise.
- [Introduction] I don’t believe we’ve had the opportunity to work together before. Can you tell me a little bit about your role?
- [Introduction] What are you currently working on here at <organization name>?
- [Success metrics] What are you aiming to achieve with that work? Why is that important to the organization?
- [Success metrics] Do you have specific goals you’re trying to achieve or metrics you’re tracking?
- [Success metrics] What does success look like for you and your team? (You can timebox this for the year, quarter, half year, etc.)
- [Priorities] What challenges or business issues are currently top priorities for you? Your team?
- [Priorities] I’m currently <designing/researching/conducting discovery> on <insert problem, project, product, area of the business>. Do you have any insight you’d like to share related to those efforts?
- [History and expertise] Can you tell me about any constraints related to the work I’m doing that you think would be important for me to know about?
- [History and expertise] Can you tell me about any solutions to this problem or similar projects you’ve tried before? Could be technical, process-related, people-related, and so on? How did it turn out? Why do you think it succeeded or missed the mark?
- [Process and workflow] What is your ideal level of engagement in the project?
- [Process and workflow] What is your preferred communication method?
- [Ending] Is there anything else that would be helpful for me to know?
Introduce Yourself and Create Rapport
You’ll notice above that we included a few questions as a part of an introduction. These questions are important for creating rapport and aid in building a long-term successful relationship with the stakeholder. We like to include a few sentences about ourselves, the purpose of the interview, and a request for transparency and honesty.
Hello. Thank you for agreeing to speak with me today. My name is <your name>, and I work with <team or manager> and we’re working on a <project/initiative> to learn more about <problem, project, feature, etc.>
I’m speaking with <other leaders, team members, stakeholders, people> in the organization this week to get your perspectives on the current experiences. We’re excited to get your perspective.
I’ll ask you a few questions today to get your feedback and input. There are no right or wrong answers; feel free to be open and honest; anything you share today will not be distributed or associated back to you. You also won’t hurt my feelings with any negative feedback; we need it to learn. We will take about <XX> minutes today, is that acceptable with your schedule?
Conduct the Interview
When conducting the interview, aim to speak to stakeholders one on one. Reach out to them to schedule time via email. Include the purpose of the meeting, what to expect, and how much time you’re looking for. It is helpful to also include a sentence or two about the value of speaking to them.
Hi <stakeholder name>,
[Use if you don’t know the stakeholder] I’m <your name>, a <role> on <new project or initiative>. It’s nice to meet you and I’m looking forward to working with you.
As we kickoff <project name>, I’m working to gather important perspectives and existing knowledge about <users, previous solutions, etc>. We are hoping to leverage your expertise, establish success metrics, and gather any other insight that you think may be helpful before we begin.
Do you have <x time> available in the coming week or two to speak with me? I’ll have a handful of topics and questions prepared. We appreciate your time—it will help us be as effective as possible moving forward, as well as ensure a successful outcome.
Looking forward to speaking with you,
<Your name>
Consider framing the interview as a virtual (or in-person) “coffee.” The informal atmosphere helps relax both parties and, thus, makes the stakeholder more likely to open up.
As you conduct the interview, remain as neutral as possible and focus on active listening. Stakeholders will respond differently to interviews. Some may be quick to open and share insights, while others will need coaching. Ask open-ended probing questions to dig deeper on insights. For example, to gather more information, use prompts like:
- Tell me more about that…?
- Can you expand on that…?
- Can you give me an example…?
- Can you tell me about the last time that you did…?
- How do you feel about that…?
To explore an underlying idea mentioned, use prompts like:
- Tell me why you felt that way.
- Tell me why you did that.
- Why is that important to you?
- Why does that stand out in your memory?
Stakeholders will all respond differently to interviews. Don’t forget your basic interview etiquette:
- Help the stakeholder feel heard by taking notes, making eye contact, and offering words of acknowledgment like I see, and That’s helpful.
- Even if the stakeholder is long-winded, don’t interrupt them. Try not to rush them and ask questions in a calm, relaxed cadence. This attitude helps communicate that you have time to listen.
Ending and Followup
As a final wrapup question, we like to ask Who else should I speak to? The answer to that question gives us insight into who they think may be valuable to the project (and potentially an introduction to another key stakeholder). Once finished with your questions, thank the stakeholder for their time and for sharing their expertise.
We also like to send a followup thank-you email. This message confirms that their time was productive and establishes an open communication channel, should any future questions arise.
Alternative Approach: Email Questions
If your stakeholder is unable to give you synchronous meeting time, try emailing your questions. Rather than sending them the whole interview guide, we suggest narrowing it to the top 4-5 questions that would be most useful for you.
If you are interviewing a large group of stakeholders, you can also create a stakeholder survey. A survey will make data collection and analysis more streamlined. However, it is less likely your stakeholders will be as responsive as if you sent them an individual email.
Using the Insights
Analysis of insights from stakeholder interviews can be lightweight and informal or robust and systematic. We see teams take an informal approach when 5 or fewer stakeholders are interviewed. With this small number, it is easy to quickly outline major themes and concerns across the group and share them with the immediate team. These high-level insights are usually captured in a straightforward document.
In contrast, when 5 or more stakeholders are interviewed, teams may need to conduct more rigorous data analysis, using thematic analysis. Thematic analysis is a systematic method of breaking down and organizing data from qualitative research by tagging individual observations and quotations with appropriate codes, to facilitate the discovery of significant themes. Working with the data from their stakeholder interviews, immediate team members will identify concerns, success metrics, and ideas mentioned by multiple stakeholders.
The takeaways that emerge from this analysis should help inform all aspect of your project: UX research, ideation, priorities, timeline, resources, and stakeholder-engagement plans.
Conclusion
UX-stakeholder interviews help us gather any information that may help shape the design process, define success metrics, and ultimately meet stakeholder expectations. They save us time and resources by minimizing redundant work and lay the foundation for successful relationships with stakeholders.
