Discover · Stakeholder Map
Map the landscape
before you
start solving.
Your team sits down together and charts every person with a stake in the initiative — who you're building for, who can shape it, who'll feel the impact.
Four Rings
Proximity is the framework.
Your team discusses and places each stakeholder in a ring. The closer to the centre, the closer to the work. The conversation about placement is the exercise.
Core Users
Who is this being built for? The team names the people who will use the outcome most directly. Their needs are the primary design target.
Direct Stakeholders
Who has a named stake in the outcome? Decision-makers, sponsors, leads — people accountable for whether this succeeds or fails.
Indirect Stakeholders
Who will feel the impact without directing it? Adjacent teams, support functions, downstream groups the team needs to account for.
Extended
What's the wider ecosystem? Partners, regulators, communities whose constraints exist whether the team acknowledges them or not.
The Rings
Four rings. One picture.
Each ring frames a different question for the team to answer together. The conversation forces the right distinctions — before any solution work begins.
Core Users
Who is this built for?
The team names who will use the outcome most directly. Keeping this ring clear is what stops the session drifting toward whoever has the loudest opinion in the room.
Direct Stakeholders
Who has a named stake?
The team identifies decision-makers, sponsors, leads — people whose approval, budget, or sign-off shapes what gets built. Missing one here tends to surface at the worst possible time.
Indirect Stakeholders
Who feels the ripple?
The team maps adjacent groups that the work will touch but who have no direct say — support teams, downstream users, other departments. Easy to forget. Costly to ignore.
Extended / Public
What's the wider ecosystem?
Regulators, partners, communities. Far from the work — but their constraints are real. Invisible until they aren't.
Session Output
A map the whole
team can read
in one glance.
A shared picture the whole team leaves the room with.
The artifact captures every stakeholder the team identified, their ring, and any notes. Copy it into a brief or product spec — or carry a specific person into an Empathy Map session to go deeper on them.
The ring label travels with every card. When the team does an Empathy Map next, they already know whether they're mapping a Core User or a Direct Stakeholder.
Stakeholder Map Export
Core Users
— Product team — runs discovery sessions daily
Direct Stakeholders
— Head of Product — driving the initiative
— Engineering Lead — accountable for delivery
Indirect Stakeholders
— Customer Support — will field post-launch questions
Extended
— External API consumers — schema change affects them
For Every Role
The map that stops the blind spot.
Every role in the session gets a different reason to place stakeholders deliberately.
Facilitator
A structured exercise to run with your team — no prep required. The ring prompts guide the conversation so you're not arbitrating who belongs where. The session ends with a shared picture everyone contributed to.
Contributor
Name the people you know about and say where they sit. The rings make it easy to contribute domain knowledge without needing to know the full picture — everyone adds what they see.
Decision-Maker
A clean export of the team's collective view. Carry any stakeholder forward into the next session — the ring context travels with them so nothing needs to be re-explained.