Business Thinking for Designers

partners. Utilizing a two-by-two grid, you can quickly map 
who has power/influence in your workplace and who is willing 

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65 
Develop your business perspective
to experiment with new ways of working. As you may have 
guessed, this is called a Stakeholder Map. 
Figure 3-7: An adapted version of a Stakeholder Map by Ryan Rumsey
In my adapted version of the Stakeholder Map (Figure 3-6) the 
purpose of this plot is two-fold: 1) To understand stakeholders 
who will advocate for design when designers aren’t in the 
room, and 2) To find “less visible” projects to work on to build 
case studies of success. The grid is divided into four sections:

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66 
Develop your business perspective
• Champions: influential partners who can help drive 
scalable adoption of design
• Challengers: influential partners who may be skeptical of 
design
• Sidekicks: partners willing to experiment with something 
new and willing to forgive if the experiment doesn’t go as 
planned
• Say-nos: partners to politely de-prioritize
While it’s logical to try and work closely with Champions first, 
it’s better to try new things with Sidekicks. Champions drive 
organizational change, but they tend to be more risk-averse to 
making organizational changes without seeing evidence that 
those changes will be successful. Sidekicks will help you build 
those case studies of change, and if things don’t go as well as 
expected, they won’t be so influential as to prevent change in 
the future.