What is a Stakeholder?
Every Product Owner has to deal with stakeholders and stakeholder management. After all, you are making a product for — and together with — others. You will also have to deal with various stakeholders, both within and outside your organization. But what are stakeholders? How do you define a stakeholder? Who are your stakeholders? How can you create a stakeholder analysis? And how do you deal with your stakeholders as a Product Owner? A couple of these questions will be answered in this article, which is part of series of three articles (scroll to the bottom of this article to find the other articles).
Let’s start with the basics: What is a stakeholder? A definition of the term stakeholders is what we often use is:
Stakeholders are individual persons or groups of persons who have a direct or indirect interest in the organization and / or vice versa. They are people, organizations and institutions that have an interest in developing and / or delivering the products and services of the organization in one way or another.
Source: Paul Stamsnijder — Stakeholder management: Start met wie
As a Product Owner you have to engage with a wide variety of different stakeholders and, as a Product Owner, you can easily identify most of them. Most Product Owners know who their (potential) customers and users are, for example. These stakeholders have a clear interest in your product or service (after all, they will purchase and / or use it). Stakeholders, such as a business manager or your colleagues, are fairly easy to identify. A manager has an interest in your product or service from a sales, cost, development or management perspective for example. The colleagues are usually involved in the realization, creation or delivery of the product.
However, there are also groups of stakeholders that you may not think of that easily, and which are harder to identify. These are groups of stakeholders who appear to have no (direct) interest or have little interest in your product or service. Examples of these groups are typically governmental agencies, social organizations or the press and media. These examples may happen to be very clear stakeholders for your context, but that does not apply to most Product Owners. Also think of a manager from another business unit, who seems to have no interest in your product, but who suddenly seems to have an opinion and interest. You can easily overlook such stakeholders. As a result, these groups of stakeholders are more difficult to identify. It also happens that these types of groups appoint themselves as stakeholders. From your perspective, these stakeholders seem to have little interest in the product, so you run the risk of forgetting them. To prevent being surprised by an unforeseen group of stakeholders, you need to think carefully about these special target groups.
As a Product Owner, take a good look around you. Keep an eye on the environment and see if new stakeholders arise. This can also be outside of your own organization. Stakeholders exist in many different types. A lot of interest, little interest, direct and indirect interest and internal and external.
Learn more about stakeholder management.
Do you want to learn more about stakeholders, stakeholder analysis and stakeholder management? Then read on in one of the following articles:
- Creating a Stakeholder Analysis: How do you do that?
- Stakeholder Management for Agile Product Owners: 33 Different types of Stakeholders
- 10 Tips for Product Owners about Stakeholder Management
- 50 Shades No — Effective Stakeholder Management for the Product Owner
Do you really want to deepen your stakeholder management skills? Then contact us for a Stakeholder Management Training or participate in the Advanced Product Owner training and learn to master the Product Owner stance: The Influencer.
If you are a Product Owner, Product Manager, Scrum Master or Agile Coach with about a year or experience under your belt, go and explore our brand new class Advanced Product Owner class and master the six stances of the Product Owner ! Check out our Xebia Academy page for more information or inquire for an in-house class at training@xebia.com.
