Engaging Stakeholders with Quality-Focused Conversations

Once the current state of quality within an organisation is understood, the next step is to engage with stakeholders to uncover their perspectives, challenges, and expectations. Quality is not owned by a single team or function; it is shaped by multiple roles across the organisation. Understanding these different viewpoints is crucial for building a successful and sustainable quality engineering strategy.

Identifying Key Stakeholders

A wide range of people influence and are impacted by quality. Mapping out key stakeholders ensures that important voices are included in the conversation. Typical stakeholders include:

• Engineering teams responsible for building and maintaining software
• Product managers who define and prioritise features
• Customer support teams who hear first-hand about quality issues
• Business leaders who are focused on overall company objectives
• Compliance and security teams who ensure adherence to regulations

Creating a stakeholder map helps visualise the relationships, responsibilities, and influence each group has over quality.

Understanding Stakeholder Goals and Challenges

Each stakeholder group has its own perspective on quality, often shaped by their priorities and daily interactions with the product. The goal at this stage is to gather insights into:

• What they value most when it comes to quality
• Their biggest pain points and frustrations
• How they define and measure success

For instance, an engineering team may be focused on reducing defect rates and improving deployment reliability, whereas customer support might prioritise ease of use and issue resolution speed. Recognising these nuances allows for a more comprehensive and balanced approach to quality.

Gathering Insights Through Conversations

Engaging with stakeholders can take many forms, including one-to-one interviews, small group discussions, and structured workshops. A few key techniques include:

• Impact mapping: Connecting stakeholder priorities to business and quality outcomes.
• Journey mapping: Understanding how quality affects users and internal teams at different touchpoints.
• Surveys and structured feedback loops: Capturing perspectives at scale and over time.

However, gathering insights is just the first step. Playback and validation are crucial to ensuring that the perspectives collected are accurately captured and interpreted. This means summarising findings and playing them back to stakeholders to confirm alignment, surface any gaps, and refine understanding. Playback also helps to reinforce transparency and build trust by demonstrating that stakeholder input is actively shaping the quality strategy.

Outputs of This Step

By the end of this stage, you should have:

• A Stakeholder Map outlining key players and their roles in influencing quality
• An Insights Matrix capturing goals, challenges, and success metrics from different stakeholder groups
• A Preliminary Risk Landscape highlighting perceived risks across product, process, and people dimensions

NB: The Insights Matrix is not just a list of stakeholder perspectives; it should reflect the reality of how work gets done. While organisations have formal reporting lines, real influence often follows informal networks, relationships, and shared goals.

A useful way to visualise this is through relationship mapping, similar to how in literature studies, when analysing characters in a novel. In a book, a character map doesn’t just show hierarchy. It illustrates connections, tensions, and alliances. The same applies to organisations. A product manager may not formally report to an engineering lead, but their collaboration might be crucial in shaping quality outcomes.

Understanding these organic pathways of influence helps surface potential blockers, uncover who holds implicit authority, and identify the connectors who bring different perspectives together. Incorporating this into the Insights Matrix ensures that the quality strategy aligns with how people truly work, rather than just how the org chart suggests they should.

Why This Matters

Quality engineering is most effective when it aligns with the broader organisational context. Engaging stakeholders early ensures that quality strategies address real challenges, have buy-in from key decision-makers, and support business goals. Playback and validation help solidify this alignment, preventing misinterpretation and ensuring a shared understanding of quality priorities.

With these insights in hand, the next step in the framework is to establish a shared quality strategy that brings together technical, cultural, and organisational elements. That will be the focus of the next article in this series