Dean Peters Stakeholder Power Categories
What Is It
Use this canvas to quickly categorize and prioritize which stakeholders to engage based on power and impact. Highlight impacted stakeholders and ideate on how to elevate their roles on the effort
Why Use It
When figuring out which stakeholders to engage after you have identified a comprehensive and representative set of stakeholders. You can revisit this tool as the effort evolves, to ensure the right set of stakeholders are involved.
When to Use It
Collaborating with stakeholders and deferring to those that are impacted will results in their endorsement of the effort and better outcomes for all
How to Do It
- Categorize whether each stakeholder is impacted by the effort (the y-axis). For steps 1 & 2, don’t worry about ranking or quantifying within each quadrant. Consider impact such as financial, professional, health, communal or social opportunities, access, experience, etc. For each stakeholder, ask: Will this stakeholder be significantly affected by the effort? Does the effort provide a significant opportunity, benefit, or gain to this stakeholder? Does the effort impose a significant burden or harm to this stakeholder? If you answered yes to any question, put that stakeholder in quadrant 1 (Q1). If you answered no to every question, put that stakeholder in quadrant 3 (Q3).
- Categorize the amount of power each stakeholder has over the effort (the x-axis). Consider power in different forms, including having availability, resources, information, knowledge of how to navigate a process, and the real or perceived ability to influence others or outcomes. For each stakeholder, ask: Can this individual or group significantly shape, regulate, or influence the effort and/or another stakeholder? If the answer to this question is yes, move that stakeholder to the quadrant on the right: From Q1 -> Q2 or Q3 -> Q4
- Reflect on the patterns that have emerged. Read the quadrant descriptions to better contextualize the power categories. Then, move to the “Notice & Reflect” section on the right side. You can answer the questions in any order.
- Summarize the key takeaways and next steps in the “Assess” section at the bottom of the canvas.
Key Concepts
Impact Axis (Y) — Whether a stakeholder is significantly affected by the effort—through financial, professional, health, social, or access gains and burdens. This separates who has a stake in outcomes from who merely observes.
Power Axis (X) — A stakeholder's real or perceived ability to shape, regulate, or influence the effort or other stakeholders via availability, resources, information, or process knowledge. Power is multi-dimensional, not just hierarchical authority.
Four Quadrants — Q1 (impacted/low-power), Q2 (impacted/high-power), Q3 (unaffected/low-power), Q4 (unaffected/high-power). Each quadrant prescribes a different engagement posture, from elevating voices to managing gatekeepers.
Elevating Impacted Voices — Deliberately increasing the role of high-impact, low-power stakeholders (Q1) so the people who bear consequences shape the solution. This drives endorsement and better outcomes versus deferring only to the powerful.
Power Dynamics — The often-unspoken relationships of influence between stakeholders that determine whose needs get prioritized. Making them explicit prevents the loudest or most senior voice from silently dominating product decisions.
Notice & Reflect — The structured reflection step after categorization, where you interpret emergent patterns across quadrants rather than just placing dots. This converts a sorting exercise into actionable engagement strategy.
PM Applications
- Building the stakeholder engagement section of a PRD by documenting which quadrant each stakeholder falls into and the corresponding consultation cadence.
- Preparing for OKR planning by identifying high-power stakeholders (Q2/Q4) whose buy-in is required to commit to ambitious objectives.
- Designing discovery sprint research plans that intentionally recruit Q1 impacted-but-powerless users who are usually excluded from feedback loops.
- Creating an executive stakeholder briefing that names gatekeepers and decision-makers explicitly, so the room understands who can block or accelerate the effort.
- Re-running the canvas during quarterly roadmap reviews to detect when reorgs or budget shifts have moved stakeholders between quadrants.
- Feeding outputs into Quickstart Stakeholder Engagement to assign concrete next-step actions and owners per quadrant before backlog grooming.
Benefits
- Used to openly discuss and evaluate power dynamics for a set of stakeholders.
Common Pitfalls
- Conflating organizational seniority with power and ignoring informal influence (process knowledge, gatekeeping), which leaves you blindsided by a mid-level person who quietly kills the initiative.
- Treating placement as one-time and never revisiting it, so the canvas goes stale as org changes shift authority—leading to engaging stakeholders who no longer hold sway.
- Skipping the Notice & Reflect step and stopping at quadrant placement, producing a pretty 2x2 with no engagement actions, owners, or roadmap consequences.
- Quantifying or ranking within quadrants prematurely, which the method explicitly warns against and which manufactures false precision that derails the discussion.
- Letting Q1 impacted-but-powerless stakeholders remain decorative—acknowledging them on the canvas but never actually elevating their input into PRD requirements or design decisions.
- Running the exercise solo or with a homogeneous group, so power assessments reflect one biased perspective and miss how stakeholders perceive each other's influence.
Combine With
Use Stakeholder Identification Canvas or Community Map to help ideate a set of stakeholders Use Stakeholder Map & Matrix 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 | Intermediate |
| Group Size | 1+ people |
| Time Required | 60+ minutes |
| Source | itk.mitre.org |