Who are stakeholders and how do you work with them?

Question

Accepted Answer

A **stakeholder** is anyone with an interest in your project's outcome — they affect it or are affected by it. Recognizing who your stakeholders are, and keeping them appropriately informed and aligned, is a core part of getting work done in any organization.

## Typical stakeholders

```text
✓ Users / customers → the people using what you build
✓ Business sponsors → who funds it and owns the outcome
✓ Engineering & design → who build it
✓ Sales, marketing, support → who sell and support it
✓ Leadership → who care about strategy and results
✓ Legal / compliance / security → who set constraints
```

## How to work with them

```text
✓ IDENTIFY them early → who cares about this and why?
✓ UNDERSTAND what each one needs from the project
✓ COMMUNICATE proactively → don't make people chase you for status
✓ MANAGE EXPECTATIONS → be honest about scope and timing
✓ INVOLVE the right people in decisions that affect them
```

## A concrete example

You're building a checkout change. Engineering needs clear requirements, the support team needs a heads-up before launch, legal may need to review terms, and leadership wants to know the revenue impact. Miss one — say, launching without warning support — and you create chaos.

## A common pitfall

Only talking to the loudest stakeholder, or surprising people late. Silence reads as "things are going badly."

## Why it matters

Projects rarely fail purely on technical grounds — they fail on misalignment: a key person wasn't informed, an expectation wasn't managed, a constraint surfaced too late.

Good stakeholder habits (identify early, communicate often, no surprises) prevent most of these problems.