What is a power/interest grid?

A power/interest grid is a 2x2 chart that plots each stakeholder by how much power they hold over the program and how much interest they have in it. The four quadrants tell you how to engage each person: manage closely, keep satisfied, keep informed, or monitor. It is the fastest way to decide where your communication time should go.

How do you map stakeholders?

List everyone who can affect or is affected by the program. For each, judge their power (can they redirect, fund, or block the work) and their interest (how much do they care about the outcome). Place each into the matching quadrant. Power and interest are about the program, not the org chart, so a junior engineer with deep system knowledge can hold real power.

What does manage closely mean?

Manage closely is the strategy for stakeholders with both high power and high interest. They can make or break the program and they care about it, so they get your most active engagement: regular one-on-ones, early access to decisions, and a real say in direction. Neglecting someone in this quadrant is how programs get derailed late.

Why map stakeholders on a program?

Because attention is finite and stakeholders are not equal. Mapping forces you to spend communication effort where it changes outcomes instead of treating everyone the same. It surfaces the powerful, low-interest people you have been ignoring and the low-power, high-interest people who are eating your time, so you can right-size both.

Stakeholder Power/Interest Grid

Map every stakeholder by how much power they hold and how much they care, then see the engagement strategy for each. Add people below and watch them land in the right quadrant. Everything saves in your browser. No signup.

High Interest →

High Power →

Keep Satisfied

High Power · Low Interest

Manage Closely

High Power · High Interest

Monitor

Low Power · Low Interest

Keep Informed

Low Power · High Interest

Interest in the program

How to use a power/interest grid

Attention is the scarcest thing a program manager has, and stakeholders are not equal. A power/interest grid forces you to decide where your communication time actually goes. You judge each person on two axes: how much power they hold over the program, and how much interest they have in it. Where they land tells you how to engage them.

The four strategies are simple. Manage closely for the people with high power and high interest, they get your real time and an early seat at decisions. Keep satisfied for the powerful but disengaged, give them enough to stay on side without flooding them. Keep informed for the interested but less powerful, a steady stream of updates keeps them as allies. Monitor for the rest, a light touch is enough until something changes.

Common mistakes to avoid

Confusing power with seniority. Power is about this program. A junior engineer who owns the only path through a system holds real power.
Treating everyone as high interest. People who do not care about the outcome will tune out if you over-communicate, and you will burn time you needed elsewhere.
Ignoring the high-power, low-interest quadrant. These are the people who can quietly kill a program when they finally pay attention. Keep them satisfied before that happens.
Mapping once and forgetting it. Power and interest shift as a program moves. Re-map at major phase changes.

For more on running programs across many teams, see the Insights notes on dependency management, decision logs, and escalation paths.

Built by Arsenii Samoilov, a Senior Technical Program Manager with 19+ years at Intuit, Atlassian, Adobe, Salesforce, Roku, and Apple. If your team needs help standing up program governance, get in touch.

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