What is Stakeholder interview?
A stakeholder interview is a structured conversation with someone who has a vested interest in a project’s outcome, such as executives, product managers, subject matter experts, or customer-facing staff, to understand business goals, constraints, and domain knowledge.
How it works
Stakeholder interviews are typically conducted at the start of a project to align on objectives, understand constraints (budget, timeline, technical limitations), identify success metrics, and gather domain knowledge that will inform design decisions. Key techniques include asking about business goals (‘What does success look like in 6 months?’), understanding constraints (‘What is technically impossible or organizationally difficult?’), and probing for hidden requirements (‘What keeps you up at night about this project?’). Interviews should be conducted individually to prevent groupthink and power dynamics from suppressing honest input.
Applied example
Before redesigning an employee portal, a UX researcher interviews 8 stakeholders from HR, IT, finance, and management. The interviews reveal a critical constraint: IT is migrating databases in 3 months, so any design must accommodate a temporary dual-system period. This requirement would have emerged as a crisis if discovered during development.
Why it matters
Stakeholder interviews prevent the costly mistake of designing solutions that are technically infeasible, politically unviable, or misaligned with business objectives, by surfacing constraints and goals before design begins.
