A structured or semi-structured conversation with a person who has a business, organizational, or strategic interest in the product being designed — such as executives, product managers, support leads, or legal advisors. Stakeholder interviews surface business constraints, organizational priorities, and internal mental models that should inform — though not solely drive — design decisions.
Common contexts
- Interviewing five department heads before a redesign kickoff to surface conflicting success metrics before they create design review conflicts later
- Talking to the legal team before designing a consent flow to understand regulatory constraints that will affect copy and interaction decisions
- Running stakeholder interviews to discover that the 'user problem' the project was scoped around is actually an internal operational problem misattributed to the interface
Use when
Conduct stakeholder interviews at the start of every project with organisational complexity — particularly before any user research, so you understand the business constraints that will shape how freely you can act on what users tell you.
Avoid when
Don't let stakeholder interviews substitute for user research — stakeholders describe what they believe users need, filtered through business priorities and organisational politics, which is useful context but a poor proxy for what users actually do and need.
The most revealing moment in a stakeholder interview is when two stakeholders from the same organisation give contradictory answers to the same question — that contradiction is usually the real project brief hiding behind the official one.
Real-world examples
- The UK GOV.UK redesign team conducted 60 stakeholder interviews with ministers and departmental communications leads before designing their content model, uncovering that 'brand authority' was a higher concern than 'user findability' — a tension they had to explicitly negotiate.
- Airbnb's research team interviews internal stakeholders (finance, legal, trust and safety) at the start of every major product initiative to surface non-user constraints that would otherwise cause late-stage redesigns.
- Nielsen Norman Group recommends running stakeholder interviews before user research, not after, so that contradictions between business goals and user needs are visible at the moment research questions are being written.