itk-community-map

name	itk-community-map
description	A fast way to capture and prioritize stakeholders.
intent	Bring a thorough understanding of who your stakeholders are, how they will be impacted, and how to interface with them throughout the process. Develop a clearer prioritization of individuals to work with and engage.
type	component
phase	scope
outcome	scope
difficulty	beginner
group_size	8+ people
time_required	45+ minutes
best_for	["Kicking off a discovery initiative when stakeholder landscape is unclear and influence networks are undocumented","Onboarding to a new product domain where you need to map allies, decision-makers, and gatekeepers quickly","Planning cross-functional alignment for a feature touching multiple teams with competing priorities","Preparing a stakeholder engagement plan before a major roadmap or PRD review cycle","Building an inclusive research recruitment plan that captures underrepresented user and community voices"]
sources	["MITRE Innovation Toolkit (ITK)","https://itk.mitre.org/toolkit-tools/community-map/"]

COMMUNITY MAP

What Is It

A fast way to capture and prioritize stakeholders.

Why Use It

Bring a thorough understanding of who your stakeholders are, how they will be impacted, and how to interface with them throughout the process. Develop a clearer prioritization of individuals to work with and engage.

When to Use It

When the team needs to build a diverse and inclusive approach to collaboration so they can be mindful of the needs and priorities of the larger community.

How to Do It

1. Identify all the potential allies, audiences, and influencers for the topic. These may be individuals, organizations, or groups.
2. Write their names in the circles below – some may fit into more than one category.
3. Identify which individuals are the primary contact for any individuals or groups identified on the map, if applicable.
4. Identify which individuals on the map are most important. Determine how best to connect and build relationships with them.
5. Talk to these people to help refine your ideas, or figure out how to fold them into your research process later to validate your work.
6. Participants and audience members should discuss what went well, challenges, issues, and opportunities.

Key Concepts

Allies, Audiences, Influencers — The three core categories of the map: allies actively support your work, audiences are impacted by it, and influencers shape opinion or decisions. Sorting stakeholders this way clarifies who to recruit, inform, and persuade.

Primary Contact Routing — Identifying the single person who acts as the gateway to a group or organization. This prevents diffuse outreach and gives you an accountable entry point for engagement.

Stakeholder Prioritization — Ranking mapped individuals by importance so engagement effort concentrates where it changes outcomes. Without it, teams over-invest in low-leverage relationships and miss critical decision-makers.

Overlap Mapping — Recognizing that some stakeholders occupy multiple categories—an ally who is also a key influencer, for example. These overlaps often mark your highest-leverage relationships.

Inclusive Coverage — Deliberately surfacing the full community affected by a product, including quiet or underrepresented groups. This guards against building solutions that serve only the loudest or most visible stakeholders.

PM Applications

• Populate the stakeholder section of a PRD by mapping who must be consulted, informed, and approve before a feature ships.
• Build a research participant recruitment list for discovery sprints by ensuring allies, end-users, and influencers are all represented.
• Prepare for a roadmap review by identifying which influencers and decision-makers need pre-alignment briefings beforehand.
• Define a RACI-style engagement plan for a cross-team initiative by routing each stakeholder group through a named primary contact.
• Surface hidden gatekeepers and approval dependencies during project kickoff to de-risk later go/no-go gates.
• Inform OKR planning by mapping which community stakeholders have a stake in each key result and must validate progress.

Benefits

• Quickly categorize many stakeholders

Common Pitfalls

• Listing org names or titles instead of named individuals, which leaves you with no actual person to contact and stalls engagement.
• Treating the map as a one-time artifact rather than updating it as the org reorganizes, so your stakeholder model goes stale mid-project.
• Skipping the prioritization step and treating all stakeholders equally, which spreads engagement effort thin and starves critical decision-makers.
• Mapping only friendly allies and supporters while omitting skeptics and blockers, producing a false sense of consensus before review gates.
• Forcing every stakeholder into exactly one category and missing the high-leverage overlaps where an ally is also a key influencer.
• Filling the map in a single internal session without external validation, so assumptions about who matters go unchecked until they cause friction.

Combine With

Use Stakeholder Identification Canvas 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

• PDF: Download
• Markdown Template: template.md

Metadata

Field	Value
ITK Phase	SCOPE
Difficulty	Beginner
Group Size	8+ people
Time Required	45+ minutes
Source	itk.mitre.org