| name | itk-stakeholder-identify |
| description | Ideate a more comprehensive & representative set of relevant stakeholders to your project. |
| intent | Identify a more comprehensive set of stakeholders (including groups who may benefit or become burned). Consider the needs and priorities of the larger community. Encourage a diverse and inclusive approach to collaboration. |
| type | component |
| phase | scope |
| outcome | generate |
| difficulty | beginner |
| group_size | 2+ people |
| time_required | 60+ minutes |
| best_for | ["Early discovery when you need to map who benefits or gets harmed before committing to a solution scope","Pre-engagement planning to surface marginalized or non-obvious stakeholders before building a stakeholder engagement strategy","Kicking off a new initiative where conflicting priorities require an inclusive, equity-aware view of who matters","Designing for regulated or public-sector products where indirect and downstream impacts carry real consequences","Re-scoping a project that stalled because key affected groups were overlooked in the original requirements"] |
| sources | ["MITRE Innovation Toolkit (ITK)","https://itk.mitre.org/toolkit-tools/stakeholder-identification-canvas/"] |
Stakeholder Identification Canvas
What Is It
Ideate a more comprehensive & representative set of relevant stakeholders to your project.
Why Use It
Identify a more comprehensive set of stakeholders (including groups who may benefit or become burned). Consider the needs and priorities of the larger community. Encourage a diverse and inclusive approach to collaboration.
When to Use It
When you need to consider the people involved, interested, or impacted by your project or initiative. Use this before you develop your stakeholder engagement strategy.
How to Do It
- Begin on the left. In the “Who are all the stakeholders” area, quickly write down potential stakeholders for the topic. Once you’re done, take a look through and begin categorizing & marking stakeholders into groups. If you’re stuck, one common marking to use is those who provide resources (R), permission (P), and/or are decision makers (D). TIP: Don’t spend too much time in the initial “Who are all the stakeholders” area because you can continue to add stakeholders throughout the canvas and categorizing will help to expand your list.
- Now move to the top right half of the canvas. Categorize your stakeholders by moving them to the customers, connectors, and audience of focus areas.
- Next, move to the middle right half of the canvas. Answer the prompts in the “Build Empathy” and “Notice Bias & Assumptions” areas. TIP: When Building Empathy, it helps to think about who might experience a difference or consequence from the effort.
- Evaluate whether this is the full set of stakeholders that need to be considered for this effort. If not, continue to ideate until you can answer “yes” with confidence or have identified a strategy for determining how you might determine whether it is the full set or not.
- Lastly, move to the bottom portion of the canvas. Based on the prior discussion, narrow down your list to 2-3 stakeholders that the team needs to understand better. Capture any actions that have arisen in the discussion TIP: Considering primary, secondary, and tertiary effects of the effort will help you recognize a comprehensive list of stakeholders and vice versa.
Key Concepts
Customers, Connectors, Audience — A categorization scheme separating direct users (customers), intermediaries who spread or influence (connectors), and those observing or affected (audience). Sorting stakeholders this way clarifies engagement priority and influence pathways.
R/P/D Marking — Tagging stakeholders as providers of Resources, Permission, or Decision-making authority. This quickly reveals who can fund, block, or approve your initiative versus who is merely interested.
Build Empathy — Deliberately considering who experiences a difference or consequence from your effort. It shifts stakeholder thinking from org-chart roles to lived impact, surfacing needs that requirements would otherwise miss.
Notice Bias & Assumptions — Explicitly naming the team's blind spots about who counts as a stakeholder. Without this step, teams default to familiar, well-resourced voices and exclude underrepresented or edge-case populations.
Primary, Secondary, Tertiary Effects — Tracing ripple effects of your product outward from direct users to indirectly impacted groups. Considering these orders of effect produces a more comprehensive and defensible stakeholder list.
Equity Lens — A facilitation discipline of stretching the team to include those at the margins or edges who are typically underrepresented. It drives more equitable product outcomes rather than optimizing only for powerful stakeholders.
PM Applications
- Populate the stakeholder section of a PRD with a validated, comprehensive list before writing requirements, ensuring downstream and affected groups are represented.
- Run as a kickoff workshop during a discovery sprint to align the team on who the product serves and who it might harm before scoping the MVP.
- Feed the narrowed 2-3 priority stakeholders into a Stakeholder Map & Matrix or Power/Interest grid for engagement prioritization.
- Identify interview and research targets for Jobs-to-be-Done discovery by surfacing non-obvious user segments and edge populations.
- Prepare an executive or cross-team stakeholder briefing by mapping connectors and decision-makers using the R/P/D marking.
- Use during roadmap reviews to pressure-test whether planned initiatives account for secondary and tertiary impacts on overlooked groups.
Benefits
- Helps teams broaden their thinking to ideate a more comprehensive & representative set of relevant stakeholders, which is important for creating more equitable outcomes Helps address the challenge listed in Stakeholder Map & Matrix of not knowing who to include
Common Pitfalls
- Treating the initial 'who are all the stakeholders' brainstorm as the final list instead of expanding it during categorization, producing a shallow, default-biased set.
- Running the canvas without a facilitator skilled in the equity lens, so the team only names familiar, well-resourced stakeholders and misses marginalized groups.
- Confusing the categorization step with prioritization and engaging everyone equally, which dilutes effort instead of focusing on the 2-3 stakeholders to understand deeply.
- Skipping the 'Notice Bias & Assumptions' prompt, leaving unexamined blind spots that surface later as missed requirements or harmed user groups.
- Generating a comprehensive list but capturing no concrete next-step actions, so the canvas becomes a static artifact that never informs engagement strategy.
- Listing roles or org units instead of actual people and impacted communities, which keeps empathy abstract and weakens downstream research targeting.
Combine With
Use Community Map to ideate more stakeholders Use Stakeholder Map & Matrix and/or Stakeholder Power Categories to help prioritize which stakeholders you want to engage Use Quickstart Stakeholder Engagement to help develop next steps to engage with each stakeholder
Assets
Metadata
| Field | Value |
|---|
| ITK Phase | SCOPE |
| Difficulty | Beginner |
| Group Size | 2+ people |
| Time Required | 60+ minutes |
| Source | itk.mitre.org |
