Internal and External Stakeholders
A stakeholder is anyone whose interests your product touches: whose support you need, whose constraints you inherit, or who can derail you if they are surprised. The first behavior under Stakeholder Management is proactively identifying them, and I take "proactively" literally. You map them before the project, not in the post-mortem.
#The trap of treating them as one blob
New PMs say "I need to manage my stakeholders" as if it is a single task. It is not. A sales leader who wants a feature for one deal, a platform owner whose policy you have to comply with, and an engineering manager you share a team with are three completely different relationships. Lump them together and you will over-communicate with the people who do not care and under-communicate with the ones who will sink you.
So I split them on two axes: internal versus external, and how much they can actually affect the outcome.
#Internal stakeholders
People inside your company. You will see them in the hallway, share OKRs with them, and need them repeatedly, so the relationship compounds over time. The major types:
| Type | What they want | How I manage them |
|---|---|---|
| Engineering & Design | Clear problems, stable scope, the "why" | Daily partnership; this is Cross-Functional Collaboration, not "stakeholder management" |
| Executives / leadership | Confidence the bet is sound; no surprises | Managing Up: brevity, business framing, Executive Communication |
| Sales / GTM / Marketing | Things to sell; launch dates; messaging | Translate their asks into problems; never let one deal set the roadmap |
| Support / Ops | Fewer tickets; advance warning of changes | A rich Voice of the Customer channel; warn them before launches |
| Data / Legal / Finance | Correctness, compliance, viable economics | Pull them in early as consultants, not last-minute approvers |
#External stakeholders
People outside the building. The stakes per interaction are higher, the contact is less frequent, and you represent the whole company when you talk to them.
- Customers and users are the most important external voice, but treat their feedback as input, not instruction. (How I separate signal from the loudest request: Voice of the Customer.)
- Partners, which in my world meant league and media partners and co-marketing deals. Mutual value, or the relationship rots.
- Vendors and platform owners like Apple, Google, and payment processors. You do not control their constraints, so you design around them. Manage expectations transparently and keep your credibility intact.
#Mapping: who needs what
Identification on its own is not enough. I sort everyone by influence on the outcome and interest in it, the classic 2x2. It tells me where to spend communication effort.
| Low interest | High interest | |
|---|---|---|
| High influence | Keep satisfied (execs who must not be surprised) | Manage closely (partners, decision-makers, your core team) |
| Low influence | Monitor (a light update is plenty) | Keep informed (engaged users, adjacent teams) |
The failure mode is inverting it: pouring energy into vocal low-influence stakeholders while a high-influence one quietly loses confidence in you.
#The tie to decision rights
This is where mapping gets sharp. A stakeholder map tells you who cares. It does not tell you who decides. Conflating the two is how PMs end up paralyzed, treating everyone with an opinion as a veto. That is why I always pair the map with RACI and Decision Rights, so every stakeholder gets an explicit role: Owner, Partner/Approver, Consulted, or merely Informed. "You are a consulted stakeholder, not an approver on this one" is one of the most useful sentences a PM can say, and it is only possible once the decision rights are written down.
Take five minutes at the start of any non-trivial initiative: list everyone the work touches, place them in the 2x2, assign each a RACI role, and decide your cadence for each. It is the cheapest insurance I know against a late-stage blindside.
#Continue Reading
- Stakeholder Management for the competency this mapping serves.
- RACI and Decision Rights for turning a stakeholder into a precise decision role.
- Cross-Functional Collaboration for why the daily-partner stakeholders deserve their own discipline.
- Managing Up for the executive stakeholders, handled as their own competency.
- Voice of the Customer for how to weigh the most important external stakeholder.