Your stakeholders can make or break your content. Getting a key stakeholder on-side can send you rocketing to success, while failing to engage or convince them can sink your project without a trace.
That’s because your stakeholders – product or service or program owners, subject matter experts, campaign managers, or whoever – are just as much a part of the content as you, the content professional. You might be responsible for the content, but they’re responsible for the thing the content is about. And they might have a lot riding on your work.
Stakeholder interviews aren’t all there is to winning over the people you work with, but they’re a pretty good place to start. They can help you get to know someone’s needs and priorities, find out the best way to work with them, and how to get them on your side. More than that, they’re a learning experience that’ll give you insights and ideas that you never would have thought of otherwise. I start almost every project I do with stakeholder interviews.
To get value from them, you need more than just a good list of questions to ask. You need to know who to speak to, when to speak to them, and how to ask the questions. So that’s what we’re focusing on in this guide. You’ll also find a link to a free toolkit with a stakeholder matrix and some handy starter questions to help you get going. Get the free stakeholder interview toolkit.
When to run stakeholder interviews
The ideal time to do stakeholder interviews is right at the beginning of a project, in the discovery phase. That way you can get off to a good start with an overview of perspectives. The other benefit is that you can make sure people feel included and consulted from the start.
In reality though, sometimes this doesn’t happen. In those instances, it’s still worth doing stakeholder interviews, as long as you’re fully prepared to change course based on what you hear. There’s no point asking questions if you’re not going to act on what you learn.
It’s also a great idea to do them when you start a new role, to help you get a better handle on your new colleagues. (And then make them a regular occurrence, so you have uninterrupted time to talk about big picture things that might be ignored in the rush of day to day activity.)
Who to interview and creating a stakeholder matrix
To work out who to interview, think about who is involved in the content or project in question. Who will provide knowledge about the subject or domain area? Who will sign it off? Who is dependent on the success or failure of the content/project? Who will be involved in the planning, creation, delivery, publishing? Who has a useful strategic or leadership perspective?
Capture this in a stakeholder matrix. A stakeholder matrix is a tool – usually a spreadsheet – you can use to identify and categorise stakeholders based on their level of influence and interest in a project. The matrix will help you to prioritise who to speak to. It can also help with planning comms and involvement for the rest of the project too. If you already have a RACI matrix, that will help you with this exercise.
As well as the name and role of the stakeholder, you should also think about how supportive they are of the project and what level of decision-making power they have in relation to it. It also helps to make notes on what you already know about their areas of interest, pain points, and motivations. You can download a stakeholder matrix template I’ve made here.
Once you have that, you should prioritise who to speak to. Of course it’s important to interview anyone with decision-making power and the people who you know will champion the project, but it’s perhaps even more important to speak to people who aren’t supportive of the work – you’re likely to learn a lot more from them. Try to speak to people from a wide, representative range of perspectives so that you get a balanced picture.
One-to-one interviews are the best way to approach stakeholder interviews in my opinion. In a one-to-one setting (whether that’s online or in person) you can focus, get into plenty of depth, and people often find it easier to open up and be candid.
If time is a challenge, small group interviews can work. You need to facilitate carefully to make sure all stakeholders have time to speak. And you also need to think about the power dynamics and relationships at play. If you interview a manager and their report, will the report feel comfortable being honest, or will they defer to their boss? If you interview two people who have conflicting interests, will you get derailed by a debate?
If you have a very large number of people who need to be consulted, running a survey can work, and is always better than not consulting people at all.
What to ask in a stakeholder interview
What to ask really depends on who you’re speaking to and what kind of project it’s in relation to. However, there two very important rules to follow:
- Always go in with a plan: it could be a fully developed script, a discussion guide, or a list of topics you want to cover, just make sure you have something. Sure, you can probably wing it, but you’ll get more out of it and make better use of your stakeholder’s time if you’ve prepared.
- Ask open questions. Open questions are questions that aren’t leading, and don’t lead to one-word, yes/no answers. For example:
- DON’T ASK: ‘Why do you think this project will be a good thing?’
- DO ASK: ‘What do you think the impact of this project will be?’
- DON’T ASK: ‘Does this project affect you and your team?’
- DO ASK: ‘How does this project affect you and your team?’
In the template, I’ve suggested some potential questions that would help you get to know your stakeholders and what’s important to them. Feel free to add your own, and tweak them so that they make sense for you and what you’re working on.
The questions fall into four groups:
- General ‘get-to-know-you’ questions: If you don’t know the person you’re interviewing well, be sure to start with these. They’ll help you to find out about what they do and their team. If you do know them, these general questions can still help you find out more about their opportunities and pain points, and give you some insight into what motivates and frustrates them. I also suggest asking them what they think the project is all about – you can’t assume that their understanding of it is the same as yours.
- ‘Now’ questions: These are about what’s happening right now, how they work with content at the moment, what are their processes, etc. These questions can help you get a much more detailed picture of their world and how your work fits into it.
- ‘Future’ questions: questions to uncover their hopes and fears for the project, dig into what they want to see, what success looks like to them, and what they’re worried about. This is often the most revealing section.
- Other: I always end with the same question that I learnt from Kim Goodwin ‘What haven’t I asked you that I should have asked you?’ This can be a saviour if you’ve somehow missed off a topic that was important to the interviewee.
How to approach your interview
As I said at the start, how you ask your questions and run your interview is just as important as the questions you ask. Great interviewing is a serious skill that takes years to master – and I’m not ashamed to say that I’m still learning, even after so many years of doing this. Here are some lessons I’ve learnt so far:
- Set the scene: You need to set the scene and choose an environment that makes your subject feel comfortable. Sitting across a wide desk in a windowless meeting room can make it feel like an interrogation. Part of this is also how you tee up the interview – be sure to explain why you’re doing it, that’s it’s not a test, there are no right or wrong answers, and that you’re there to learn from them. Being friendly and open and working on your rapport helps too.
- Practice active listening: Active listening means not just passively ‘hearing’ while mentally preparing for the next thing you want to ask. It means giving your full attention to what the interviewee is saying and doing (and what they’re not), and seeking to understand them, without judgement. Other than asking questions, you shouldn’t be saying much. It’s really important to try not to jump in and interrupt their answers too. You can use encouraging signals, like a nod, a ‘Mmm’ or a ‘Go on’, but keep it short and unobtrusive. Don’t offer your opinions, counter what they’re saying, or turn it into a conversation.
- Clarify if you need to: One exception is if you’re not clear about anything you’ve heard. If that happens, clarify things right away. A good way to do this is to summarise back what you’ve heard: ‘So you’re saying that…?’ to check your understanding matches their meaning. It’s good to do this if they share a big, complex point too.
- Ask follow-up questions: Don’t rigidly stick to your prepared questions like a script. Follow interesting threads in the discussion and ask follow-up questions to explore in more depth.
- Leave pauses: It might feel awkward, but leaving moments of silence is a good thing to do. Sometimes people need a moment to think and a pause will give them that. So let pauses happen. Similarly, interesting stuff can come up once the official part of the interview has ended – so keep recording.
Recording vs taking notes
This might be controversial, but I strongly advise against taking notes during an interview. (Other than maybe jotting down quick reminders you need about ideas for follow up questions, clarifications, etc.) If you’re writing notes, you’re not giving the interviewee your full attention, and you’ll miss all sorts of things.
Record the interview rather than taking notes at the time. (Only if you have permission, and have been very clear about how the recording will be used.) Write up your observations, quotes and findings later on – yes it takes longer, but you’ll get so much more out of it.
If it’s permitted by your AI policy, and you’re confident that the tool you use is not feeding your transcripts into an LLM, AI transcription tools are pretty great these days and can save a lot of time. I really caution against using the summaries provided by Zoom, Gemini, Teams, etc. rather than the full transcript. These tools cannot work out what the important points are, and miss so much detail.
Analysing your findings and reporting back
Finishing an interview isn’t the end of the process. The transcript or recording is just the raw data. To come up with meaningful, useful insights you need to analyse the transcript, synthesise points from all the interviews into findings, and then report back to other people.
I use a tool called Dovetail for this, which is a research repository. It’s not essential, but it does make things quicker and easier.
I take my AI transcript, and read back through it while playing the video at double speed. As I go, I highlight important points, tag them with relevant terms, and make notes as I go.
Then I’ll look for patterns, trends and themes from across multiple interviews – those are the insights. Dovetail allows you to create collections of quotes and insights based on the patterns, trends and themes.
Once you have your insights, it’s time to report back to people. Show the rest of the team – and the people you interviewed what you learnt. It can be great to do this in a call rather than just sharing the report, so that people can ask questions and engage with the findings more.
You also need to make sure that you use the insights as evidence to point to when you’re communicating what decisions you made and why.
Resources
Stakeholder interview toolkit, Lauren Pope
The Sensemaker’s Guide to Stakeholders, Abby Covert
