Circular buy-in

Map your stakeholders, understand their perspectives, and create narratives to help them feel invested in your cause.

In order to get your product or service to market, you’ll need to identify key stakeholders (from investors, employees, internal stakeholders, and design teams) and make plans to get them excited by your potential project. You will also need to develop strategies for how you involve these stakeholders throughout the project, from co-creation to keeping them engaged.

Steps

Step 1

Map your stakeholders for your initiative using the template provided. You might want to make two different ones – for internal stakeholders (within your company or project or start-up) and one for external stakeholders (those who you might need to partner with as part of any potential business idea).

Step 2

Take your stakeholders one by one and consider each of their perspectives using the following questions:

• What matters to them most?

• What keeps them up at night?

• How do they problem solve?

• Who else do they have around them that might support your idea?

Step 3

Building off these perspectives, develop a narrative/conversation starter for each person. Notably, they might be very different from one person to another. What matters to them the most?

Step 4

Once you have your narrative in place, ask yourself – Is there also the possibility of showing an early prototype to gain their interest? This could even be a simple sketch.

Step 5

Start the conversation using these questions if helpful:

• Can you think of ways to build on this?

• How could we work together?

• What else do you need to know?

• How might we show proof of concept quickly and at minimal cost, to mitigate risk?