Stakeholder Identification Template
Six steps, one worksheet each. Quality checks at the bottom.
Provenance
Adapted from prompts/ in the
product-manager-prompts repo.
Step 1: Brainstorm without filtering
Four to six minutes, silent if in a group. Do not evaluate yet — evaluating during generation is what produces a list of the same eight people every time.
## Stakeholder Brainstorm: [Initiative]
Individuals, teams, organizations, and groups:
- [name or role]
- [name or role]Step 2: Categorize
A stakeholder can appear in more than one column. The overlaps are the interesting part — an ally who is also a gatekeeper is a different relationship than either alone.
| Stakeholder | Ally | Audience | Influencer |
|---|---|---|---|
| [who] | ✓ | | ✓ |- Allies — actively support this, or benefit from its success
- Audiences — impacted by the outcome, directly or indirectly
- Influencers — shape decisions, opinion, or adoption without participating directly
Step 3: R/P/D marking
| Stakeholder | R (Resources) | P (Permission) | D (Decision) | Notes |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| [who] | budget/data/access | approval/sign-off | final say | |The gap test: anyone holding P or D who wasn't in your Step 1 list is a gap that will surface later as a blocked launch. Add them now and note that you missed them — the pattern of who you forget is itself information.
Step 4: Equity lens
### Equity Lens
- Who experiences a significant consequence — financially, professionally, or personally?
- Who bears the product's costs or risks **without power to shape its design**?
- Whose perspective is missing because we assumed someone else represents them?
- Primary users? Secondary users? Affected in the third degree?
**Added by this lens:**
- [who, and what consequence they bear]Stakeholders surfaced here usually land in Q1 of a stakeholder map — high impact, low power — and are the ones most likely to be discovered late.
Step 5: Bias and assumptions
### Bias Check
- Who did we default to naming first? [answer]
- Who is absent, and why? [answer]
- What did we assume about who counts as a stakeholder? [answer]Record the answers. They shape the research plan and recruitment strategy, not just this list.
Step 6: Narrow to priority targets
Two or three. More than that isn't prioritization.
### Priority Stakeholders
| Name | Category | R/P/D | What we need to learn |
|---|---|---|---|
| | | | |Choose from:
- Highest-power decision-makers whose buy-in is required
- Highest-impact users whose needs are least understood
- Most likely blockers or skeptics
Quality checks
Generation
- Step 1 ran without filtering — no one was excluded during brainstorm
- The list includes people outside your organization where relevant
Coverage
- Every P and D holder appears; any late additions are noted as gaps
- Overlaps between categories are marked rather than forced into one column
- The equity lens actually added someone. If it added nobody, it wasn't run honestly
Honesty
- The bias check names a real default, not "we were thorough"
- Someone who bears cost without power is on the list
Prioritization
- Two or three priority targets, not eight
- Each has a specific "what we need to learn," not "understand their needs"
- At least one is a likely skeptic or blocker