How to talk to your bosses’ boss: 3 tips for your first stakeholder interview
What you should know about, and how to avoid getting overwhelmed
“I haven’t done a stakeholder interview before. Are they the same as user interviews?”
This was what a Junior UX Designer asked me, when I asked him to do one with our Product Manager while I was away. After thinking about it a little, this is the answer I gave him.
User interviews are a standard user research method used by UX designers and researchers. It asks one user questions about a topic of interest to gauge interest, understand their workflow, and more.
Stakeholder interviews tap into some of the same parts, but it has a much broader focus. It’s here where you can get context around the project, understand success metrics and business goals, and even neutralize organizational politics.
But most importantly, it’s an established way of increasing buy-in and communication for the project.
Stakeholder interviews are about involving your team
Hell hath no fury like a bureaucrat scorned.
— Milton Friedman
In her book Just Enough Research, Erica Hall talks about how the design process is always tied to the organization.
Design projects are always a series of decisions, and resources like budgets and approvals depend on successfully negotiating the organizational structure.
Because of this, one of the most common questions that result in roadblocks is WWIC: Why wasn’t I consulted?
If you don’t involve specific stakeholders, they can be the ones that trip up the project, cause unexpected delays, or change the vision of the project last minute.
So stakeholder interviews are often a part of doing due diligence on your part. But it’s not just preventing errors later on: it’s also learning about individuals, their business perspectives, and the project's success. After all, while your team might be the ones to create this project, it might affect the workflows of the rest of the business.
With that in mind, how do you do a stakeholder interview?
How to conduct a stakeholder interview?
Before starting a stakeholder interview, the most important thing is to figure out the individual goal you want to address with it.
Unlike user interviews, where you might have a similar goal across all of your participants, you want to cater your interviews to the individual you’re talking to.
For example, some goals might include:
Identifying potential concerns or obstacles
Assessing technological limitations and previous explorations
Understanding competitors and potential market challenges
Outlining communication and involvement preferences
Establishing buy-in and support
Signing them on as a project champion
Creating shared success metrics
However, you might not want to ask a VP of Product the same questions as a Lead Developer. This is where you need to choose what goals you want to pursue with the interview.
Nielsen/Norman recommends questions that cover 4 high-level topics:
Success metrics: what success looks like, tangibly, in their eyes
Priorities: what they know or hear from users or customers and want to address
History and expertise: questions that target their unique perspective or role
Process and workflow: how they want to be kept in the loop
When you have a few questions in mind, I recommend reading their guide to turn those questions into an interview script.
However, then next step, upon looking at the goals and questions you’ve set, is to consider what’s the right method of talking with your stakeholders.
It’s not always with an interview.
Is an e-mail a better choice?
Things get a little bit trickier if you’re trying to interview stakeholders that you don’t meet with on a regular basis.
I’ve often conducted stakeholder interviews as “hanger-on” meetings (introvert link) after another meeting, or easily reached out to them at another time.
But when you don’t meet with a stakeholder regularly, scheduling a meeting can be a whole lot more tedious. Consider how you might interview the “VP of Product” at your company. How would get ahold of them, and would you be able to conduct the interview in a timely matter?
In these cases, if you’re mainly trying to get a sense of their viewpoint instead of some crucial information, you may just want to e-mail the top 4–5 questions to a specific stakeholder.
Lastly, especially if you’re a junior designer, there’s one more thing you should know: this is the potentially the first time you’ll deal with hostile interviewees.
Dealing with potentially hostile interviewees
Some of you, in user interviews, might have never had to deal with hostile users. That’s more likely to happen with stakeholder interviews for three primary reasons: people have ‘skin in the game’, they were caught by surprise, or you're often disrupting their work.
The name ‘stakeholder’ is the surest sign of that: that means these people hold a stake in the project’s success (as well as a potential holiday bonus). Perhaps they think they know the best approach (if the rest of the team would just listen), or their pet project was snubbed because of this.
As a result, they often want to be prepared for this interview, just like you’d want to be. If it seems like they were roped in last-minute, or they’re not quite sure why you reached out to them, they might express that with hostility.
Or perhaps they might be okay helping you, except their interrupting their work. For example, salespeople don’t like to be taken off the floor (i.e.,, not selling) because their paycheck often comes from their sales. I’ve seen this a lot with getting medical professionals to stop their work and talk with me.
In either case, they may start attacking process or you personally, or trying to end things early. If that happens, take a deep breath, and attempt to get the interview back on track.
This is where practicing and preparing an interview script ahead of time can help a lot: stick to the script, keep calm, and try again. In addition, make sure you’re prepared to describe the process and justify its value.
If it doesn’t seem to be going well, it’s okay to cut the interview short. However, try to be upfront and professional when you talk with stakeholders about why you’re interviewing them ahead of time, and you often won’t encounter this.
Stakeholder interviews help you understand individual business needs
I was a bit surprised when a a junior designer told me they had never done stakeholder interviews, but it makes sense on further reflection.
User interviews are often the cornerstone of any user research that a UX designer At this time,or researcher does, along with usability testing. On the other hand, stakeholder interviews tend to happen during the discovery phase or when you’re coming into a new project.
But ignoring stakeholders not only ignores the viewpoint of each of your team members: it may actively impede you later on when confusions (or hurt feelings) arise when a stakeholder turns out to have another point of view.
Not only that, stakeholder interviews are one of the best ways of eliciting project requirements, a greater understanding of how work affects your design, and how you should tailor your design to an organization.
So if you’re given the opportunity, don’t be afraid to interview your team and other stakeholders. They can give you a lot of context and history about the organization, provide success metrics, and help you shape your design process.
This understanding helps make sure that you design something that meets both user and businesses needs.
Want to become a UX professional? I’ve written a free e-book explaining how to make yourself an ideal UX candidate.
Kai Wong is a Senior Product Designer and a top Design Writer on Medium. His new book, Data-informed UX Design, explains small changes you can make regarding data to improve your UX Design process.