Dean Peters 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
- Identify all the potential allies, audiences, and influencers for the topic. These may be individuals, organizations, or groups.
- Write their names in the circles below – some may fit into more than one category.
- Identify which individuals are the primary contact for any individuals or groups identified on the map, if applicable.
- Identify which individuals on the map are most important. Determine how best to connect and build relationships with them.
- 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.
- 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 |