CX Mental Models & Frameworks · Organizational Design
Stakeholder Map
Map stakeholders into three circles — core, involved, informed — and stop letting everyone decide.
A Stakeholder Map sorts everyone touching a project into concentric circles of involvement: a core team doing the work, an outer circle providing input, and everyone else kept informed. It sets clear ownership, surfaces likely detractors early, and keeps unqualified voices out of specialist decisions.
Projects rot when nobody knows who decides. Overlapping responsibilities kill morale; open-invite workshops replace research with guessing. The map fixes both with three circles. The inner circle is the core team — qualified CX and UX professionals, lead engineers, product owners — accountable for outcomes and aligned to a shared vision. The outer circle brings specialized knowledge, like call-center specialists with unvarnished customer intelligence. Everyone else is informed, not involved.
- Inner circle: does the daily work, owns the outcomes
- Outer circle: provides input and expertise, not daily decisions
- Informed: gets status and results, joins no research or design tasks
- Identify detractors early — sales worried about commissions, engineering worried about speed
- Seat accessibility expertise early; retrofitting it invites litigation
The hard rule: do not democratize the inner circle. CX tasks belong to people qualified to hold a professional CX job, the same way you would not crowdsource your legal strategy. And be transparent about the map itself — teams should know which circle they sit in and how their performance will be measured. Hidden hierarchies breed the resentment the map was supposed to prevent.
Apply this
Reading about stakeholder map is one thing. Seeing where it applies in your journey is the useful part.