You need to know who’ll be talking to and what are the internal politics within the client's company. Understanding each person's role, seniority in decision-making, and level of involvement in the workshop will help you create this stakeholder map for you and your team to refer to during critical decision-making periods.

It is important to enable all participants to share their input but do not forget who gets the final say in some of these decisions.

When creating the map, you can split them on two axes: power and interest. Power implies the weight of that person in decision making whereas domain knowledge represents the expertise that person has to the particular challenge being solved.

Interest shows how important this project or product is to that person. For example, some stakeholders may dual as the product owner of a project, and may have a particular interest in the success of that project. Success could lead to a budget increase in that department, a salary raise, or a promotion, for example.

In reality, this means that this person might be able to dedicate a significant amount to time to working with you. Try your best to get them as involved as possible as these types of stakeholders should want the project to succeed as much as you do. Make these stakeholders allies and figure out how to best utilize them as a resource.

Power tells you if that person has decision-making power over the budget and the product. If someone can cut off the funding, then they’re someone you need to manage carefully.

Template for this exercise → FigJam