At Modern Tribe, we emphasize understanding our clients’ needs to deliver successful enterprise WordPress products. Our stakeholder interview process, honed over nearly two decades launching digital projects across diverse sectors, is integral to our discovery phase, and ensuring that what we build meets client objectives.
This article provides insights into our approach and highlights the crucial role of stakeholder interviews in achieving overall project success.
So, what exactly is a stakeholder?
A stakeholder is any client representative directly involved or impacted with the project, who can provide useful insight into the organization and its product or services. There are two main types of stakeholder; internal and external. Internal stakeholders are directly involved in the project and can often include executive teams, website managers and technical staff. External stakeholders are not directly involved with the project, and are often our clients’ end users or customers.
What is a stakeholder interview?
A stakeholder interview is a planned discussion between the Modern Tribe team and a stakeholder group, typically in the project’s early discovery phase. These interviews inform subsequent strategy, design, and engineering efforts. Depending on the project’s nature and size, multiple interviews may involve various internal and external stakeholder groups.
The interviews focus on gathering insights into project expectations, business goals, pain points, and successes. As a global digital agency, our stakeholder interviews primarily occur via video chat, though we may arrange in-person sessions at client offices for a more personalized experience.
What are the benefits of conducting stakeholder interviews?
Stakeholder knowledge is crucial, given their deep understanding of the organization and the impact of the product on broader business goals. Well-conducted stakeholder interviews provide valuable insights, ensuring the final product aligns with everyone’s needs. These interviews also anticipate obstacles, fostering a productive relationship between agency and client teams.
Stakeholder interviews help to:
Gather context: Stakeholder interviews can help to uncover historical context that accompanies a project, before it begins. This promotes project efficiency by aligning our approach with the client’s setup.
Define business goals: Stakeholders offer insights into business problems and objectives, enabling the establishment of success metrics that consider both client and end-user perspectives.
Improve user experience: Understanding stakeholder preferences and user needs allows for tailoring the product, enhancing the user experience and increasing satisfaction.
Foster improved decision making: Insights gained will aid in making informed decisions about feature set, design, functionality and other important aspects of the product.
Mitigate risk: Identifying potential conflicts, challenges, or disagreements early on allows for proactive resolution, reducing the risk of project delays or failures.
Increase buy-in: Stakeholders are more likely to stay invested and support the overall project once they have had a chance to contribute in a meaningful way.
Our stakeholder interview process (in a nutshell)
1. Establish research goals
In this phase, we start with a central question: “What do we need to learn for project success?” This involves understanding stakeholder expectations, defining key business goals, identifying primary product users, assessing product usage, identifying existing system pain points, and establishing shared success metrics. These objectives provide a common focus for interviews, ensuring productive discussions.
2. Identify stakeholder groups
This crucial step in the stakeholder interview process involves collaborating with the client team to identify internal stakeholders and main user groups. By pinpointing specific individuals for interviews, we ensure comprehensive representation on both sides, gaining a thorough understanding of the product’s current state and future viability.
3. Prepare questions
We tailor specific sets of questions for each stakeholder group, aiming to capture unique insights from their organizational experience and product knowledge. This qualitative approach fosters natural conversations, making stakeholders more comfortable and enhancing the quality and depth of their responses. Our questions delve into organizational research, audiences, current product usage, and future vision.
During question preparation, we focus on a handful of high-level areas essential for project success. These can include:
- Expertise: Experiences shaped by a stakeholder group’s unique perspective, role or interactions
- Success metrics: What project success looks like to this particular stakeholder group
- Priorities: Stakeholder perspectives on what needs solving, changing, or maintaining, drawn from personal experiences and user/customer feedback
From here we prepare open-ended questions which will allow the stakeholder group to elaborate on their answers.
Sample stakeholder interview guide
- In your opinion, what is the objective of this project?
- Why is this project important to you?
- Tell me a little bit about your role. What does a typical day look like for you?
- What are your most common tasks within the system?
- What kinds of work-arounds do you use?
- How would you define success for this project?
- What excites you most about this project?
- What concerns do you have about this project?
- What do you think the greatest challenges to success are? Internal and external?
- Which audiences are most important to you?
- How do people find out about you?
- How do you want audiences to feel when they use your product?
- What is the primary reason visitors come to you?
- What is the current product successful at? How could it be improved?
- If we didn’t build this, who would feel the most impact by it?
- Are there any similar/companies (clients or competitors) that you feel do things well with their product?
4. Conduct the interviews
Interviews involve 2-3 stakeholders and at least two Modern Tribe team members, typically a Product Strategist and a Designer. This ratio allows for detailed insights, with one leading the questioning and the other capturing key insights in note form.
5. Review and analyze responses
Following each interview, our team conducts a retrospective to refine the approach and question list for subsequent interviews. Once all interviews are finished, the collected data undergoes rigorous analysis, examining observations, recordings, and feedback to identify patterns, trends, conflicts, challenges, or areas for improvement.
6. Synthesize Insights and Recommendations
From the analysis, we derive actionable insights and recommendations, covering design changes, feature enhancements, and usability/accessibility adjustments. This translation of raw data into strategic directives ensures a project that not only meets but exceeds expectations.
Best practices for conducting stakeholder interviews
- Be clear about the goals of your stakeholder interviews
- Carefully identify and prepare your stakeholder groupings
- Tailor interview questions to each stakeholder group
- Include open-ended questions
- Consider providing the interview questions to interviewees before the interview
- For less technical interviews, consider providing a step-by-step guide on how to join virtual meetings
- Conduct interviews in pairs – one to lead the questioning, the other to note key insights
- Record all interview sessions; advise of the intention to record beforehand, as not everyone will be comfortable with this approach despite its benefits
- Send a thank-you message with a contact address; this is not only polite and professional, but also provides a line of communication that can often provide additional insight from stakeholders after interviews conclude
- Send a quantitative survey for groups you could not interview; this can be an efficient and easy way to gather quantitative data where stakeholders groups are large, and interviewing doesn’t make sense
Stakeholder interviews stand as a cornerstone in Modern Tribe’s commitment to delivering successful enterprise products by deeply understanding clients’ needs. With a comprehensive approach developed over our diverse sector experience, our stakeholder interview process plays a pivotal role in the discovery phase, ensuring project success. The benefits of conducting stakeholder interviews are far-reaching, encompassing the gathering of historical context, definition of business goals, improvement of user experience, facilitation of improved decision-making, mitigation of risks, and an increase in stakeholder buy-in. Through this transparent and collaborative approach, we foster strong relationships with our clients and pave the way for successful project outcomes.