 Are you fed up of endless design revisions? Are your projects always taking longer than expected to finish? Are your stakeholders and clients really difficult to work with? Don't worry, here's a secret to solve these problems. I'm Chris, and as a head of product design, I spent most of my days speaking to different teams in product, engineering, and leadership. And one of my key responsibilities in this role was to communicate outside my design organization, asking questions like, what's your most pressing priority? How can my team help? The success and failure of any product or project starts and ends with the stakeholder. Engaging with stakeholders is a form of risk management. When stakeholder engagement is done effectively, it validates the project's stake, improves communication flows between parties, minimizes creative blocks, and prevents endless cycles of revisions. So how do you do this? By doing stakeholder interviews. Stakeholder interviews are a fundamental step at the beginning of any UX project. You can use these interviews to help understand your client's needs, demands, goals, and vision while identifying technical constraints and fostering commitment for a smooth running project. So how do you prepare for a successful stakeholder interview? Step one, define your research goals. Identify all the questions regarding your project. This needs to be done at the beginning in order for you to approach your selected stakeholders. Some questions could be, who is this solution for and why do they need it? What are the significant assumptions we need to clarify? What are the concerns or constraints do you foresee? Step two, selecting the stakeholders. Select the stakeholders that you need to interview that will give you insight and context to your research questions. These could be product managers, engineers, marketing, sales, even customers. Step three, choose the structure of your interview. Structured interviews have a rigorous set of questions that do not allow one to divert. However, semi-structured interviews allow new ideas to be brought up during the interview as a result of what the interviewee is saying. Finally, there's the unstructured interviews, allowing questions to arise spontaneously in a free-flowing conversation. Step four, prepare an interview guide. Your interview guide paves the way for deep free-flowing conversation with participants. Break these down into four sections. Introduction, warm-up, project-specific, and closing remarks. Introduction is setting context for the research and what you wanna find out from them. Warm-up questions help participants relax, engage in more free-flowing conversation. Project-specific questions. You wanna spend bulk of your time in the interviews on these. And finally, closing remarks. In this section, you need to thank your participants but also ask them for a referral if you should speak to anybody else. Step five, practice, practice, and practice. Do a dry run and ask yourself, are my questions being adequately answered by stakeholders? Did we accidentally use confusing terms or jargon to confuse anybody? How can we improve the flow of one section to another? Practice. Practice. Practice. Practice. Practice. Why is stakeholder interviews important? When you don't do stakeholder diligence properly, you'll lose the opportunity to gain valuable insights that can help you pinpoint, untapped opportunities, potentials, and blockers. You might even run into communication troubles with your stakeholders. Let's take the FTX example, albeit slightly extreme. Yep. FTX filed bankruptcy after moving customer funds into Alameda Research and reportedly one billion vanished. People lost a lot of money. This is a clear sign of acting on the behalf of customers without their consent. Look, there's a question of what happened and why and who did what. And this could be similar if you're designing on assumptions that could lead your client and company to lose money. That was a huge mistake of mine. You do not wanna make the same mistake. And that's it. That's your stakeholder interview. Whether it's working on projects from small startups to fortune 500s, I always start with interviews. Gaining context and getting deep into the problem space is the essence of a designer's role. Clearly articulating the problem holistically is the difference between a senior and a junior designer. Start fostering commitment and unison to a project and build constructive working relationships. Do this by kickstarting conversations with your stakeholders through these interviews. If you're interested in learning more about stakeholder interviews with a detailed guide and templates, check out the link in the description. Or hit the big red button for another play-by-play breakdown of UX frameworks. Bye.