/stakeholder-identification

name: stakeholder-identification
argument-hint: "[initiative]"
description: Map every stakeholder before engaging anyone. Use when launching an initiative, scoping discovery, or building an engagement plan from scratch.
intent: >-
  Produce a comprehensive, equity-aware stakeholder set before any engagement begins.
  Combines broad brainstorm with structured categorization (Allies / Audiences / Influencers,
  R/P/D marking), an explicit equity and bias check, and a disciplined narrowing to
  the 2-3 stakeholders to understand deeply first. Designed to run as a solo exercise
  or a kickoff workshop. Feed outputs directly into stakeholder-mapping for prioritization.
type: component
best_for:
  - "Launching a new initiative where the stakeholder landscape is unmapped and influence networks are unknown"
  - "Scoping a discovery sprint to define who to research, interview, and recruit"
  - "Preparing a PRD stakeholder section with a validated, comprehensive list before writing requirements"
  - "Onboarding to a new product domain and needing to map allies, gatekeepers, and decision-makers quickly"
  - "Pressure-testing an existing stakeholder list for blind spots, bias, and missing edge-case populations"
scenarios:
  - "Who are all the stakeholders for this initiative?"
  - "Are we missing anyone important in our stakeholder map?"
  - "Help me prepare the stakeholder section of my PRD"
  - "Who should we recruit for discovery research?"
sources:
  - "MITRE Innovation Toolkit — Stakeholder Identification Canvas: https://itk.mitre.org/toolkit-tools/stakeholder-identification-canvas/"
  - "MITRE Innovation Toolkit — Community Map: https://itk.mitre.org/toolkit-tools/community-map/"
theme: stakeholder-comms
estimated_time: "20-30 min"

Stakeholder Identification

Purpose

Map every stakeholder before engaging anyone. This skill produces a comprehensive, equity-aware stakeholder set — not just the obvious sponsors and users, but the gatekeepers, the impacted communities, and the voices your team defaults to overlooking.

Most PM stakeholder lists are written from memory in five minutes. They reliably capture executives, product peers, and the most vocal users. They reliably miss the marginalized user groups who bear the product's consequences without having the organizational power to shape its decisions. This skill forces a slower, more structured brainstorm that builds the foundation for every engagement decision that follows.

Use this before stakeholder-mapping (which prioritizes) and before stakeholder-engagement-advisor (which plans per-stakeholder outreach). Identification comes first — you cannot prioritize people you haven't named.

Input

**Works best with:** The initiative, product, or decision you're mapping stakeholders for. **Also useful:** Stakeholders already on your list (the skill's job is to find who's missing), org context, and affected communities.

Anything supplied with the invocation itself — text after the skill name, a pasted context dump, or an appended `ARGUMENTS:` line — counts as answers already given. Use it and skip whatever it covers; don't re-ask.

**Arriving empty-handed? That works too.** The skill asks what the initiative is and who it touches, then runs the equity-aware sweep.

**Example invocation:** `Identify stakeholders for migrating all customers to the new billing system by Q4.`

Key Concepts

**Allies, Audiences, Influencers** — The three categories that clarify stakeholder relationship to your work. Allies actively support the initiative; audiences are impacted by it; influencers shape opinion or decisions without being directly affected. Sorting stakeholders this way reveals who to recruit, who to inform, and who to persuade — three different engagement jobs.

**R/P/D Marking** — Tagging each stakeholder as a provider of Resources (budget, headcount, access), Permission (approval to proceed, regulatory clearance), or Decision-making authority (final say). This quickly surfaces who can fund, block, or green-light your initiative versus who is merely interested. One stakeholder can hold multiple tags.

**Equity Lens** — Deliberately stretching the list to include stakeholders who are often excluded: marginalized user populations, frontline employees, downstream communities, people who bear the product's consequences but lack organizational power to influence its design. Without this step, teams optimize for loud, well-resourced voices and build products that fail the quieter majority.

**Primary, Secondary, Tertiary Effects** — Tracing ripple effects of your product outward from direct users to indirectly affected groups. A feature that changes how support agents work (primary) affects how customers experience service (secondary), which affects the company's reputation and churn (tertiary). Following the chain surfaces stakeholders that single-level thinking misses.

**Notice Bias & Assumptions** — An explicit team check: who did we default to naming? Who is absent from the list? Whose perspective are we treating as universal? This step names the blind spots before they become requirements gaps.

**Identification vs. Prioritization** — The discipline of separating who exists from who matters most. The goal of this skill is a complete list, not a prioritized one. Collapsing these two steps causes teams to prematurely cut stakeholders they haven't yet understood. Prioritization happens in stakeholder-mapping.

Application

**Step 1 — Brainstorm without filtering**

Generate a fast, unconstrained list of potential stakeholders: individuals, teams, organizations, and communities connected to this initiative. Do not self-edit. Write down anyone who could plausibly have a stake — even if their involvement seems unlikely.

If working in a group, run this silently for 4-6 minutes before sharing.

**Step 2 — Categorize**

Sort each stakeholder into one or more of these categories:

• **Allies** — who actively supports this work or would ben