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Stakeholder Mapping

Stakeholder mapping helps you identify who is involved in or affected by your project. As a creative technologist, your work often touches on the interests of users, clients, teammates, institutions, or even invisible systems. Mapping these stakeholders helps you understand expectations, spot potential conflicts, and design more inclusive and realistic solutions.

If you don’t make your stakeholders visible, you risk designing only from your own perspective or missing out on important constraints, needs, or influences.

Starting Point

  • Begin by listing all the people, roles, or groups who have a stake in your project. Who uses it, who builds it, who pays for it, who regulates it?
  • Categorize stakeholders based on their relationship to the project. Are they primary users, secondary users, decision-makers, supporters, or blockers?
  • Ask Generative AI to imagine all stakeholders involved in your brief and identify which ones are relevant.
  • Miro Stakeholder Map Template
  • Sketch your own. Place your project in the center and map people around it based on influence and proximity.

Key Points

  • Always ask: What does this stakeholder want? What do they fear? What power do they have over the project?
  • Don’t forget indirect stakeholders, like maintenance teams, affected communities, or people interacting with the system in unexpected ways.
  • Use stakeholder mapping early in your process to spot tensions or blind spots. Update it as your project evolves.
  • Make it visual. A simple diagram makes it easier to discuss roles and priorities with your team or client.