Stakeholders & Concerns
Identify stakeholders, elicit their concerns, and reconcile trade-offs into architecture decisions
TL;DR: Architecture aligns diverse stakeholder needs with system qualities. Identify stakeholders, elicit their concerns, prioritize and negotiate trade-offs, then record decisions and rationale.
Learning Objectives
- You will be able to identify key stakeholder groups and their primary concerns
- You will be able to map concerns to system qualities and measurable objectives
- You will be able to facilitate trade-off decisions and document them transparently
- You will be able to trace design choices to stakeholder needs over time
Motivating Scenario
Your team is designing a new payments API. Product wants fast time-to-market, Security requires PCI alignment, SRE cares about SLOs, and Sales needs EU data residency assurances. Without an explicit stakeholder–concerns model, design debates become circular. With it, you can prioritize and justify decisions, avoid costly rework, and align execution across teams.
The Stakeholder-Concerns Process
Part 1: Understanding Stakeholders and Concerns
What Are Stakeholders and Concerns?
Stakeholders are individuals, groups, or organizations that have a vested interest in the system's success, failure, or operation. They influence or are influenced by architectural decisions.
Concerns are matters of interest that affect the system's architecture—they represent what stakeholders care about and what drives their requirements.
Why This Matters
Understanding stakeholders and their concerns is fundamental to software architecture because:
- Architecture decisions must serve stakeholder needs - Every design choice should trace back to addressing specific stakeholder concerns
- Trade-offs become explicit - When concerns conflict, you can make informed decisions about priorities
- Communication improves - Clear stakeholder-concern mapping enables better collaboration and reduces misunderstandings
- Change management becomes systematic - As stakeholder needs evolve, you can assess impact and adjust architecture accordingly
Stakeholder Categories
Stakeholders can be categorized by their relationship to the system:
- Primary stakeholders: Direct users, customers, and those who directly benefit from or are affected by the system
- Secondary stakeholders: Those who influence or are influenced by the system but don't directly use it (regulators, partners, auditors)
- Internal stakeholders: Team members, management, and organizational units within your company
- External stakeholders: Customers, partners, regulators, and third-party service providers
Comprehensive Stakeholder Catalog
| Stakeholder | Common Concerns | Priority Level |
|---|---|---|
| Executive leadership (CIO/CTO/VPs) | Strategy alignment, ROI, risk, governance, regulatory posture | High |
| Product management / Owners | Time-to-market, differentiation, roadmap feasibility, scope trade-offs | High |
| Business / Finance / FinOps | Unit economics, budgets, cost visibility, chargeback/showback | High |
| End users / Customers | Usability/UX, performance (TTFB/TTI), reliability, accessibility | High |
| Engineering / Development | Modularity, maintainability, testability, developer experience | High |
| SRE / Operations / Incident Response | Availability, resilience, observability, capacity, run cost | High |
| Security / AppSec | Least privilege, authn/z, secrets, supply chain, threat model | High |
| Privacy / Legal / DPO | Data classification, residency, retention, DPIA/consent, contracts | High |
| Regulators / Standards Bodies | Regulatory obligations, reporting, lawful basis, sanctions | High |
| Program / Project / PMO | Dependencies, delivery risk, milestones, cross-team coordination | Medium |
| Sales / Pre-sales / Solutions | Customer commitments, SLAs, integration promises, demos/POCs | Medium |
| Marketing / Analytics | Attribution, SEO, experimentation, consent, data flows | Medium |
| Customer Success / Support | Diagnostics, error clarity, feature flags, rollback paths | Medium |
| Tenant admins (B2B) | SSO/SCIM, RBAC, audit logs, data export, deprovisioning | Medium |
| UX / Design / Accessibility | Information architecture, a11y compliance, design system constraints | Medium |
| QA / Testing | Testability, environments, data management, determinism, flake control | Medium |
| Platform / Infrastructure / DevOps | Standardization, portability, quotas/limits, golden paths | Medium |
| Network / DBA | Connectivity, latency, resiliency, schema health, backups/restore | Medium |
| Data Eng / Analytics / Science / MLOps | Data quality, lineage, drift, feature stores, privacy | Medium |
| Risk Management / Internal Audit | Controls effectiveness, evidence, segregation of duties | Medium |
| External Auditors / Certifiers | Compliance scope, audit trails, change control, findings | Medium |
| Partners / ISVs / Integrators | Stable contracts, versioning, deprecations, sandboxing | Medium |
| Third-party providers (Cloud/IdP/PSP/SaaS) | SLAs, incident comms, integration limits, pricing/quotas | Medium |
| Localization / Regional Ops | i18n/l10n, local regulations, data residency, formats | Medium |
| Procurement / Vendor Mgmt | Sourcing, licensing, contractual obligations, exit strategy | Low |
| IT Service Desk / Field Eng | Runbooks, support tooling, access, escalation paths | Low |
| Documentation / Training / DevRel | Developer experience, docs completeness, examples, SDKs | Low |
| Open-source community (if applicable) | Contribution model, governance, release cadence | Low |
This catalog is intentionally broad. Select and tailor to your context; add domain‑specific stakeholders (e.g., clinicians, drivers, merchants) as needed.
Part 2: Mapping Concerns to Quality Attributes
The Translation Process
The key to effective stakeholder management is translating vague concerns into measurable objectives tied to quality attributes. This process involves:
- Eliciting specific requirements from stakeholder concerns
- Defining measurable criteria for each concern
- Establishing acceptance thresholds and monitoring mechanisms
- Creating traceability from concerns to implementation
Common Concern-to-Quality Mappings
Concern Translation Examples
Quality Attribute Scenarios
For each concern, develop quality attribute scenarios that specify:
- Source: Who or what triggers the scenario
- Stimulus: The event or condition that occurs
- Environment: The system state when the stimulus occurs
- Artifact: The part of the system affected
- Response: How the system should respond
- Response measure: How to measure the response
Example scenario for performance:
- Source: End user
- Stimulus: Submits payment form during peak hours
- Environment: System under 2x normal load
- Artifact: Payment processing service
- Response: Process payment and return confirmation
- Response measure: 95% of requests complete within 300ms
Part 3: Managing Conflicts and Trade-offs
When Concerns Conflict
When concerns conflict (e.g., time-to-market vs. long-term maintainability), facilitate explicit choices. Use small, time-boxed decision workshops that surface options, risks, and acceptance criteria. Record rationale in Architecture Decision Records (ADRs).
Trade-off Analysis Framework
Common Trade-off Patterns
| Approach | Time to Market | Technical Quality | Cost | Risk | Best For |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| MVP Approach | ⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐ (9/10) | ⭐⭐ (4/10) | ⭐⭐⭐⭐ (7/10) | ⭐⭐⭐ (6/10) | High uncertainty, time-critical projects |
| Modular Design | ⭐⭐ (5/10) | ⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐ (9/10) | ⭐⭐ (5/10) | ⭐⭐⭐⭐ (8/10) | Stable domain, long-term evolution |
| Hybrid Approach | ⭐⭐⭐⭐ (7/10) | ⭐⭐⭐⭐ (7/10) | ⭐⭐⭐ (6/10) | ⭐⭐⭐⭐ (7/10) | Balanced timeline and quality needs |
Legend: ⭐ = Score out of 10, where 10 is best for that criterion
Trade-off Analysis Details
MVP Approach
- Pros: Fast delivery, early feedback, lower initial cost
- Cons: Technical debt risk, potential rework, scalability concerns
- When to use: High uncertainty, time-critical projects, proof of concept
Modular Design
- Pros: Easier evolution, better maintainability, lower long-term risk
- Cons: Longer lead time, higher initial cost, over-engineering risk
- When to use: Stable domain, core capabilities, long-term projects
Hybrid Approach
- Pros: Balanced timeline, selective investment, managed risk
- Cons: Complexity in decision-making, potential inconsistency
- When to use: Mixed requirements, phased delivery, evolving understanding
Decision Workshop Process
-
Preparation (1-2 hours)
- Identify conflicting concerns and stakeholders
- Gather relevant data and constraints
- Prepare decision framework and criteria
-
Workshop (2-4 hours)
- Present context and constraints
- Brainstorm options and alternatives
- Evaluate trade-offs using structured criteria
- Reach consensus on decision and rationale
-
Documentation (1 hour)
- Record decision in ADR format
- Define acceptance criteria and success metrics
- Plan communication and implementation
-
Follow-up (ongoing)
- Monitor decision outcomes
- Review and adjust as context changes
- Update stakeholders on progress
Part 4: Practical Application
Real-World Example: Payment API
Comprehensive Stakeholder-Concerns Register
# Stakeholder-Concerns Register for Payment API
project: "Payment Processing API v2"
version: "1.0"
last_updated: "2025-09-10"
stakeholders:
- name: "Product Management"
type: "internal"
priority: "high"
concerns:
- label: "time-to-market"
priority: "high"
description: "Ship core checkout functionality in Q4"
evidence: "Customer commitments and competitive pressure"
measurable_criteria: "Feature complete by Dec 15, 2025"
- label: "user-experience"
priority: "medium"
description: "Seamless checkout flow with minimal friction"
evidence: "User research showing 15% abandonment rate"
measurable_criteria: "Checkout completion rate ≥ 85%"
- name: "Security Team"
type: "internal"
priority: "high"
concerns:
- label: "pci-compliance"
priority: "high"
description: "Full PCI DSS Level 1 compliance"
evidence: "Regulatory requirement for card processing"
measurable_criteria: "Pass quarterly PCI audit; no card data stored"
- label: "data-protection"
priority: "high"
description: "Protect customer PII and payment data"
evidence: "GDPR and CCPA requirements"
measurable_criteria: "All PII encrypted; audit logs for access"
- name: "SRE Team"
type: "internal"
priority: "high"
concerns:
- label: "availability"
priority: "high"
description: "High availability during peak shopping periods"
evidence: "Black Friday traffic spikes cause outages"
measurable_criteria: "SLO 99.9% monthly; RTO ≤ 4 hours"
- label: "observability"
priority: "medium"
description: "Comprehensive monitoring and alerting"
evidence: "Previous incidents lacked visibility"
measurable_criteria: "All critical paths instrumented; <5min MTTR"
- name: "End Users"
type: "external"
priority: "high"
concerns:
- label: "performance"
priority: "high"
description: "Fast, responsive payment experience"
evidence: "User research on payment page performance"
measurable_criteria: "p95 latency ≤ 300ms; TTFB ≤ 100ms"
- label: "security-trust"
priority: "high"
description: "Confidence in payment security"
evidence: "Security incidents damage brand trust"
measurable_criteria: "Zero security incidents; visible security indicators"
quality_objectives:
- attribute: "performance"
metric: "p95_latency_ms"
target: 300
measurement: "Application metrics"
owner: "SRE Team"
- attribute: "availability"
metric: "monthly_slo"
target: "99.9%"
measurement: "Uptime monitoring"
owner: "SRE Team"
- attribute: "security"
metric: "pci_compliance_score"
target: "100%"
measurement: "Quarterly audit"
owner: "Security Team"
- attribute: "usability"
metric: "checkout_completion_rate"
target: "85%"
measurement: "Analytics tracking"
owner: "Product Management"
decisions:
- id: "ADR-012"
title: "Tokenization via PSP Vault"
status: "accepted"
date: "2025-09-10"
stakeholders: ["Security Team", "Product Management", "SRE Team"]
rationale: "Meets PCI compliance requirements while maintaining acceptable latency"
trade_offs:
- concern: "time-to-market"
impact: "positive"
note: "Faster implementation than building in-house"
- concern: "performance"
impact: "negative"
note: "Additional network call adds ~50ms latency"
acceptance_criteria:
- "PCI audit passes"
- "p95 latency ≤ 300ms maintained"
- "Integration complete by Nov 1"
links:
- "./architectural-decision-impact-and-cost-of-change"
- "./quality-attributes"
conflicts:
- id: "CONFLICT-001"
title: "Time-to-market vs Security"
stakeholders: ["Product Management", "Security Team"]
description: "Product wants quick delivery; Security requires thorough review"
resolution: "Phased approach with security review gates"
decision_ref: "ADR-012"
Hands-on Exercise
Complete this exercise to practice stakeholder analysis and concern mapping:
Step 1: Stakeholder Identification (30 minutes)
- List all stakeholders for your current system or project
- Categorize them as internal/external and primary/secondary
- Prioritize stakeholders based on influence and impact
- Document contact information and preferred communication methods
Step 2: Concern Elicitation (60 minutes)
- Schedule interviews with top 5-8 stakeholders (30-45 minutes each)
- Use structured questions:
- What are your top 3 concerns about this system?
- What evidence supports these concerns?
- What would success look like?
- What are the consequences if these concerns aren't addressed?
- Document concerns with evidence and rationale
Step 3: Quality Mapping (45 minutes)
- Map each concern to measurable quality attributes
- Define specific metrics and thresholds
- Identify measurement methods and owners
- Create quality attribute scenarios for key concerns
Step 4: Conflict Resolution (60 minutes)
- Identify conflicting concerns between stakeholders
- Facilitate a decision workshop with relevant stakeholders
- Use structured criteria to evaluate options
- Document the decision in ADR format
Step 5: Implementation Planning (30 minutes)
- Create acceptance criteria for each quality objective
- Plan monitoring and measurement approach
- Schedule regular reviews of stakeholder concerns
- Establish communication plan for decision updates
Part 5: Validation and Best Practices
Self-Check Questions
Answer these questions to validate your understanding:
- Can you name at least five distinct stakeholder groups for your system and their primary concerns?
- For a stated concern, can you express a measurable objective or SLO/metric with specific thresholds?
- Where is the decision rationale recorded and how is it traced to tests/roadmap implementation?
- How do you handle conflicting concerns between different stakeholder groups?
- What process do you use to keep stakeholder concerns current as the system evolves?
Signals and Anti-Signals
Applying Stakeholder-Concerns Analysis
Common Patterns
Stakeholder Mapping Pattern: Systematically identify and categorize stakeholders by influence and interest level. Use a stakeholder matrix to prioritize engagement efforts.
Concern Elicitation Pattern: Use structured interviews and workshops to gather concerns. Focus on evidence, consequences, and success criteria rather than solutions.
Quality Translation Pattern: Convert vague concerns into measurable quality attributes with specific metrics, thresholds, and measurement methods.
Trade-off Documentation Pattern: Record all architectural decisions with clear rationale, trade-offs, and acceptance criteria in ADRs.
Common Pitfalls
Stakeholder Blindness: Failing to identify all relevant stakeholders, especially external ones like regulators, partners, or end users.
Vague Concerns: Accepting concerns like "make it secure" or "make it fast" without defining measurable criteria.
Hidden Assumptions: Not surfacing and validating assumptions about stakeholder needs, constraints, or priorities.
Decision Amnesia: Making architectural decisions without documenting rationale, leading to repeated debates and inconsistent choices.
Static Analysis: Treating stakeholder concerns as fixed requirements rather than evolving needs that require regular review.
Design Review Checklist
Stakeholder-Concerns Analysis Checklist
- All relevant stakeholders identified and categorized
- Top concerns elicited with evidence and rationale
- Concerns mapped to measurable quality attributes (SLIs/SLOs)
- Conflicts and trade-offs explicitly identified and discussed
- Decisions recorded in ADRs with clear rationale and impacts
- Traceability established from concerns to roadmap, tests, and alerts
- Stakeholder communication plan defined and executed
- Regular review process established for evolving concerns
- Quality attribute scenarios defined for key concerns
- Acceptance criteria specified for each quality objective
- Monitoring and measurement approach planned
- Decision workshop process documented and followed
Part 6: Implementation Considerations
Operational Considerations
SLO Ownership and Monitoring
- Define clear owners for each SLO and link to dashboards/alerts
- Establish escalation procedures when SLOs are at risk
- Create runbooks for decision fallbacks or feature kill-switches when trade-offs go wrong
- Implement cost controls and budget alerts based on stakeholder cost concerns
- Plan capacity management based on performance and availability requirements
Change Management
- Version stakeholder concerns and track changes over time
- Communicate impact of architectural changes to affected stakeholders
- Plan rollback strategies for decisions that don't meet stakeholder expectations
- Establish feedback loops to validate that decisions address original concerns
See Observability & Operations for detailed monitoring and operational guidance.
Security, Privacy, and Compliance
Stakeholder Engagement
- Engage Security and Privacy as first-class stakeholders from project inception
- Document security controls (authentication, authorization, encryption, secrets management)
- Map regulatory requirements to specific stakeholder concerns (PCI, GDPR, HIPAA, SOX)
- Establish compliance review gates in the decision-making process
Risk Management
- Conduct threat modeling based on stakeholder security concerns
- Define security metrics and monitoring for stakeholder security requirements
- Plan incident response procedures for security-related stakeholder concerns
- Establish audit trails for compliance with regulatory stakeholder requirements
See Security Architecture for comprehensive security guidance.
Observability
Metrics and Monitoring
- Derive logs, metrics, and traces from stakeholder concerns (e.g., latency SLI, auth failures)
- Ensure correlation IDs support traceability from concerns to implementation
- Create stakeholder-specific dashboards for different concern categories
- Implement alerting based on stakeholder-defined thresholds and SLOs
Performance Monitoring
- Monitor quality attribute metrics that map to stakeholder concerns
- Track business metrics that stakeholders care about (conversion rates, user satisfaction)
- Implement synthetic monitoring for critical stakeholder scenarios
- Plan capacity forecasting based on stakeholder growth expectations
See Observability & Operations for detailed monitoring strategies.
Testing
Test Strategy Alignment
- Align tests to concerns: performance tests to latency targets, resilience tests to error budgets, security scans to policy
- Create stakeholder-specific test scenarios that validate quality attribute requirements
- Implement contract testing for external stakeholder integrations
- Plan user acceptance testing with end-user stakeholders
Quality Assurance
- Define test coverage requirements based on stakeholder risk tolerance
- Implement automated testing for stakeholder-critical quality attributes
- Plan chaos engineering to validate resilience stakeholder concerns
- Establish testing environments that mirror stakeholder usage patterns
See Testing Strategy for comprehensive testing approaches.
Part 7: When to Use This Framework
When to Use This Framework
Project Initiation: At the start of major initiatives to establish clear stakeholder alignment and quality objectives.
Milestone Reviews: At key project milestones to validate that stakeholder concerns are being addressed and to identify new concerns.
Change Events: When risks, constraints, or stakeholder needs change materially (new regulations, market shifts, technology changes).
Decision Points: Before making significant architectural decisions that could impact multiple stakeholder groups.
Crisis Situations: When stakeholder concerns are not being met and you need to understand root causes and trade-offs.
When Not to Use
Over-Engineering: Don't apply this framework to trivial decisions or simple systems with minimal stakeholder complexity.
Fixed Requirements: Don't treat concerns as immutable requirements; they should evolve with context and learning.
Optimization Paralysis: Avoid trying to optimize all quality attributes simultaneously—prioritize based on stakeholder impact.
One-Time Analysis: Don't treat stakeholder analysis as a one-time activity; concerns evolve and require regular review.
Solo Decisions: Don't use this framework for decisions that don't impact multiple stakeholders or have clear technical trade-offs.
Part 8: Next Steps and Key Takeaways
Next Steps
Continue your architecture journey with these related topics:
- Read Architecture vs. Design vs. Implementation to understand the relationship between architecture and implementation decisions
- Study Architectural Decision Impact & Cost of Change to learn how to evaluate and document architectural decisions
- Explore Architecture Governance & Organization and Roles to understand organizational aspects of architecture
- Review Quality Attributes for detailed guidance on defining and measuring system qualities
- Learn Documentation & Modeling for best practices in documenting architectural decisions and models
Questions This Article Answers
- Who are the stakeholders of a software system and what do they care about?
- How do I turn vague concerns into measurable architecture objectives?
- How do I reconcile conflicting concerns and record the rationale?
- What process should I use to identify and prioritize stakeholder concerns?
- How do I ensure decisions are traceable back to stakeholder needs?
- When should I revisit stakeholder concerns and how often?
Key Takeaways
One takeaway: Make concerns measurable and trace decisions to them—it keeps architecture honest and evolvable. Every architectural decision should be traceable back to specific stakeholder concerns with clear rationale for trade-offs.
Stakeholder analysis is foundational to good architecture. Without understanding who cares about what, architectural decisions become arbitrary and disconnected from real needs.
Concerns must be measurable to be actionable. Vague requirements like "make it secure" or "make it fast" lead to inconsistent implementations and missed expectations.
Trade-offs are inevitable and should be explicit. Documenting the rationale for decisions helps teams understand constraints and make better choices in the future.
Stakeholder concerns evolve with context, learning, and changing business needs. Regular review and update of stakeholder analysis ensures architecture remains relevant and valuable.