Stakeholders Often Aren't
It seems to me that we all need to significantly narrow the definition of a “stakeholder” to people who have a vested interest in our work’s success. Your failure must be their failure, your success their success. Some random person in the company who’s merely “interested” in your work is not a stakeholder, no matter where they sit on the hierarchy. They’re usually just a distraction. A clue: somebody sitting in on a discussion or review with their laptop open for anything other than taking notes or looking up details relevant to the discussion at hand is not a true stakeholder.
The most important stakeholders are, of course, your users/customers. Their lives are affected by the work you’re doing, and our success depends on their happiness. User stakeholders have a vested interest in our success. If you cannot talk to users/customers whose lives are directly impacted by your work, you’re being set up to fail (as is your company if you’re an agency). Interestingly, a client that’s blocking access to the true stakeholders is setting themselves up to fail as well; they’re spending money on predictably bad outcomes. A single “client representative” is a red flag.
The people who set constraints are also not usually stakeholders. Take budget as an example. To me, somebody who constrains budget is not a stakeholder unless they’re putting their own budget on the line. They have to have skin in the game. Somebody who’s just juggling numbers isn’t a stakeholder. That’s not to say we can ignore their numbers, but they should have no input in how we do our work. I’m happy for a CFO to constrain my budget. I am not happy to have them tell me what to build or how to build it. Successful organizations are based on trust. Set my budget, then trust me to get the work done.
Frankly, the same reasoning usually applies to the CEO (or most high-level managers), though that’s politically tricky. The CEO’s job is to set and communicate a strategy, then trust people to realize that strategy. (Four-person startups are an obvious exception.) I’ve seen too many projects/products go completely off the rails when some ego-driven CEO injected themselves into the work with an “I’ve got this Great Idea! Drop everything and work on it!” Of course, if you work for a CEO who puts their ego ahead of the company’s success, there’s not much you can do about it. I can guarantee a narcissistic CEO will not hold themselves responsible when things fail, so don’t be surprised when you’re scapegoated for doing what they tell you to do, however.