Stakeholder Conversation Tool

When to Use:

Interview stakeholders, who are your customers, to gain empathy and a deep understanding of their experiences, behaviour and motivations. Use interviews to test your hypotheses and challenge your beliefs.

How to Use:

1. Prepare an interview guide with your team that will facilitate the conversation to get you the learnings you seek.
2. Meet stakeholders in their own environment. Go in teams: one lead learner + one or more note takers.
3. Get them comfortable by introducing yourself, ask permissions to take notes, get to know them as a person first.

Tips:

• Ask open questions. Don’t suggest possible answers. Keep asking “Why” until you hit on their motivations.
• There’s a difference between what people say and do. If feasible, have the stakeholder show you, not tell you. Otherwise, ask for stories, have them walk you through specific experiences.
• If a stakeholder says they want a particular feature or solution, try to understand why they want it by asking : “what would be good about that?”, “what do you hope to accomplish by this feature?”
• Seek surprises, not validation.

More Tips:

I did this exercise with a dozen of stakeholders, who were internal teams in the large organisation. We involved regular and junior team members, who didn’t interact with the stakeholders before. It made the team more mature and our customers felt more heard.  The experience was unforgettable. Just be careful not to give promises during these interactions as it may become overwhelming later when you come back from all the interviews.

Advanced version

If you like the idea, you can go one step further and truly emphasise with stakeholders. Here is a canvas that I created for this purpose and you can use it too totally for free. Make a copy for each stakeholder you are going to interview.

Attributions:

Hearing vector created by vectorjuice – www.freepik.com