Stakeholder Interviews – Challenging Internal Silos

Before we write a Responsive Brief for our financial services clients, we listen. Not to the customer—yet—but to the key stakeholders inside the business.

Because no matter how aligned a company thinks it is, there are always invisible silos, assumptions, and internal truths that muddy the water when trying to get to work that drives business results.

A product owner insists on leading with a feature. A brand manager wants the brand elevated. A compliance partner needs the language differentiating a key value prop softened. And suddenly, not only is there no alignment on why the work is needed, you end up with what boils down to a to-do list instead of actual insights that get at the heart of what is needed to drive audacious business results.

That’s where stakeholder interviews come in. Not as a formality, but as a strategic tool.

We use them to:

• Expose competing priorities early
• Validate or challenge assumptions
• Uncover outdated mental models
• Bridge gaps between teams before they undermine the work

Why does that matter? Because a Brief is only as strong as the inputs that shape it. And too often, Briefs inherit the competing goals from an org chart, direction that gets copy and pasted from Brief to Brief, and provide a lack of clarity on what the business really needs.

To be successful your team and your agency needs to start with alignment on what defines success. And if your agency is not ruthlessly focused on challenging your assumptions, you end up with a strategy that checks internal boxes but does nothing to connect with your customers.

Stakeholder interviews help us see those warning signs early. And more importantly, they help us act on them to prevent downstream negative impact.

After we meet with Stakeholders we do a readout that shines a light on all of those organizational misalignments, and challenges our Clients to get very clear and very specific on what actually matters. It creates a true starting point for the project – one that sweeps away the metrics that don’t matter in order to get fully focused on the ones that do. And in the world of commoditized financial products, this clarified vision can yield a marketing effort that actually helps your product stand out.

The result? Better Briefs. Smarter strategy. More relevant work.

Want to create work that’s aligned from the inside out?  Stakeholder interviews that go beyond just checking the box is step one in getting there.