How to Conduct Stakeholder Interviews for UX Research

Difficulty: Beginner
Time Required: 2-3 hours (including preparation and follow-up)

Stakeholder interviews are one-on-one conversations with key decision-makers, subject matter experts, and team members who influence your product's direction. These interviews help you understand business goals, technical constraints, and organizational dynamics before diving into user research. Whether you're starting a new project or validating existing findings, stakeholder interviews provide the foundation for effective UX research by aligning your efforts with business objectives and uncovering requirements that users might not directly express.

This guide will walk you through how to plan, conduct, and analyze stakeholder interviews that inform your broader UX research strategy, including future activities like card sorting and user testing.

What You'll Need

• Interview participants: 3-6 key stakeholders (product managers, developers, business analysts, marketing leads)
• Recording tool: Zoom, Teams, or similar platform with recording capabilities
• Note-taking method: Digital document, notebook, or interview template
• Question framework: Prepared list of 8-12 open-ended questions
• Scheduling tool: Calendar application or scheduling platform
• Analysis workspace: Spreadsheet or affinity mapping tool for synthesizing findings

Step 1: Identify and Prioritize Your Stakeholders

Start by mapping out everyone who has influence over or knowledge about your project. Create a list that includes product owners, engineering leads, marketing managers, customer support representatives, and any domain experts.

Prioritize stakeholders based on two factors: their level of influence on product decisions and their depth of knowledge about user needs. Aim to interview 4-6 people maximum – this gives you diverse perspectives without creating analysis paralysis.

Example prioritization: For an e-commerce redesign, you might prioritize the product manager (high influence, high knowledge), lead developer (high influence, medium knowledge), and customer service manager (medium influence, high user knowledge) as your top three interviews.

This step matters because interviewing the right people saves time and ensures you gather insights that actually influence design decisions.

Step 2: Craft Your Interview Questions Around Three Key Areas

Structure your stakeholder interviews around business objectives, user assumptions, and project constraints. Prepare 8-12 open-ended questions that encourage storytelling rather than yes/no answers.

Business objectives questions:

• "What does success look like for this project in 6 months?"
• "How does this initiative tie to broader company goals?"
• "What metrics will determine if we've succeeded?"

User assumption questions:

• "Who do you think our primary users are?"
• "What's the biggest challenge users face with our current solution?"
• "What user feedback have you heard recently?"

Project constraint questions:

• "What technical limitations should I be aware of?"
• "Are there any features that are absolutely non-negotiable?"
• "What's our realistic timeline and budget?"

Well-crafted questions reveal not just facts, but also underlying assumptions and potential conflicts between different stakeholders' perspectives.

Step 3: Schedule and Structure 45-Minute Interviews

Book 45-minute sessions with each stakeholder, allowing 30 minutes for questions and 15 minutes for follow-up discussion. Send your questions 24 hours in advance so participants can prepare thoughtful responses.

Structure each interview with:

• 5 minutes: Warm-up and context setting
• 25 minutes: Core questions (spend 2-3 minutes per question)
• 10 minutes: Open discussion and clarifying questions
• 5 minutes: Next steps and thank you

Always record interviews (with permission) and take notes simultaneously. Even with recordings, live note-taking helps you catch nuances and ask immediate follow-up questions.

Example opener: "I'm conducting these interviews to better understand our business goals and user needs before we start our research. Your insights will help shape our approach and ensure we're solving the right problems."

Proper structure keeps interviews focused while giving stakeholders space to share unexpected insights that often prove most valuable.

Step 4: Listen for Contradictions and Dig Deeper

During stakeholder interviews, pay special attention to conflicting viewpoints or assumptions. When you hear disagreements between stakeholders, these often reveal important research questions for your user studies.

Use follow-up probes like:

• "Can you give me a specific example of that?"
• "How do you know that's true?"
• "What would happen if we didn't prioritize that?"
• "Who else shares that perspective?"

Example contradiction: Your product manager says users want more features, but your customer support manager says users find the current interface overwhelming. This contradiction suggests you need requirements gathering research to understand what users actually need versus what they say they want.

These contradictions often indicate where card sorting or other UX research methods can provide objective data to resolve stakeholder disagreements.

Step 5: Synthesize Findings into Themes and Research Questions

Within 24 hours of completing all interviews, analyze your notes to identify patterns, contradictions, and knowledge gaps. Create three categories:

Consensus areas: What all stakeholders agreed on (these become project requirements) Conflicting assumptions: Where stakeholders disagreed (these become research questions)
Knowledge gaps: What nobody could answer definitively (these become research priorities)

Use a simple spreadsheet with columns for "Stakeholder," "Theme," "Quote," and "Research Implication." This format makes it easy to spot patterns across interviews.

Example synthesis: If three stakeholders mention "improving navigation" but describe different navigation problems, you've identified a clear need for navigation-focused research like tree testing or card sorting to understand how users actually categorize information.

Proper synthesis transforms individual opinions into actionable research priorities that your team can rally around.

Step 6: Create a Stakeholder Requirements Summary

Document your findings in a 2-page summary that includes:

• Business objectives consensus: The 3-4 goals everyone agreed on
• User assumptions to validate: Specific beliefs about users that need research
• Technical and resource constraints: Limitations that will shape your research approach
• Recommended research activities: Specific methods to address knowledge gaps

Share this summary with all participants and ask for corrections or additions. This creates buy-in and ensures you haven't misunderstood key points.

Example recommendation: "Stakeholders disagreed on how users categorize our product features. We recommend conducting open card sorting with 20-30 users to understand their mental models before redesigning our information architecture."

This summary becomes your research roadmap and helps justify future research activities to leadership.

Tips and Best Practices

Record everything: Even casual conversations before/after interviews often contain valuable insights. Always ask permission and keep recordings organized with clear file names.

Ask about past research: Stakeholders often reference previous studies or customer feedback that you should review. This prevents duplicate research and builds on existing knowledge.

Probe for specifics: When stakeholders make broad claims about users, ask for specific examples, data sources, or customer quotes that support their assumptions.

Watch for organizational politics: Pay attention to how stakeholders describe relationships with other teams. Internal conflicts often affect project scope and success.

Follow up promptly: Send thank-you notes within 24 hours and share your synthesis document within one week while conversations are still fresh.

Common Mistakes to Avoid

Interviewing too many people: More than 6-7 stakeholder interviews creates diminishing returns and analysis overwhelm. Focus on quality over quantity.

Asking leading questions: Avoid questions like "Don't you think users would prefer X?" Instead ask "How do you think users would respond to X?"

Skipping the synthesis step: Raw interview notes aren't useful until you identify patterns and translate them into research actions.

Not addressing contradictions: When stakeholders disagree, don't ignore it. These conflicts often reveal the most important research questions.

Forgetting to validate assumptions: Stakeholder interviews reveal assumptions, but you still need user research to validate whether these assumptions are correct.

Next Steps

After completing stakeholder interviews, use your findings to plan targeted user research activities. If stakeholders disagreed about how users categorize information, conduct card sorting studies to gather objective data. If they made assumptions about user preferences, plan usability testing or surveys to validate these beliefs.

Consider creating a research roadmap that prioritizes investigations based on business impact and stakeholder alignment. Share this roadmap with your team to maintain momentum and demonstrate how stakeholder insights directly inform your research strategy.

For projects involving information architecture or navigation, stakeholder interviews often reveal the need for card sorting research to understand user mental models objectively.

Ready to turn stakeholder insights into user research? Start your card sorting study to validate assumptions about how your users organize and categorize information, providing the objective data needed to resolve stakeholder disagreements and inform design decisions.