Strategize: Product Strategy and Product Roadmap Practices for the Digital Age

by Roman Pichler

Stakeholder Analysis and Engagement Once you have identified the stakeholders, you need to determine how to best engage the individuals. A tool that helps you with this challenge is the Power-Interest Grid, described in Eden and Ackermann (2011). As its name suggests, the grid analyzes the stakeholders by taking into account their power and their interest; it assumes that stakeholders take a low or high interest in your product and have low or high power. This results in four stakeholder groups: players, subjects, context setters, and the crowd, as Figure 15 shows. To find out if a stakeholder is likely to be interested in your product, consider if the person will be affected by it; and to understand if a stakeholder has high power, ask yourself if the individual can influence, or even veto, product decisions. FIGURE 15: The Power-Interest Grid