Most stakeholder mapping examples show you four clean people in four clean quadrants. Real accounts don't look like that. They look like the one below: seven people, half of them sending mixed signals, one who never appears on a call but somehow kills half your proposals, and a champion whose job might not exist in a month. This is what mapping actually looks like once the tidy version meets a real client.
The account: a 40-person logistics company, six weeks in
You were hired by the COO to fix a broken ops reporting process. Six weeks into the engagement, here's everyone who's touched the project so far — pulled from meeting attendance, Slack mentions, and who's actually replied to your emails.
1. Priya, COO (your sponsor).High power, high interest. Hired you, approved budget, attends every check-in. The easy one — obviously "manage closely," nothing tricky here.
2. Dave, VP Operations.High power on paper — he owns the process you're fixing. But he's missed three of five check-ins and sends a direct report instead. Low observed interest despite high formal power. Judgment call: don't downgrade him to "keep satisfied" just because he's quiet. Absence from optional meetings while owning the process being changed is often avoidance, not indifference — treat him as high power, unknown interest, and find out why before you finalize his box.
3. Marcus, Ops Analyst (Dave's report).Low formal power, very high interest — he does the reporting manually today and has opinions on every design choice. Easy to dismiss as low-priority because of his title. Don't: he's the one who'll actually use what you build, and he has Dave's ear in a way you don't.
4. Renata, Finance Director.Never attends your calls. Not once in six weeks. But two proposals have come back with "Finance had questions" attached, both times after Priya mentioned the project in a leadership meeting Renata sat in on. This is the hidden blocker.She has real power (budget sign-off) and real interest (she's clearly tracking this), but zero visible engagement with you directly. Map her as high power, high interest, based on indirect evidence — not on attendance, which would place her at "monitor" and miss her entirely.
5. Jon, IT Manager.Moderate power (controls system access you need), low interest — responsive but purely transactional, answers tickets and nothing more. Straight "keep satisfied." The one stakeholder here with no ambiguity.
6. Aisha, Customer Success Lead.Low formal power, moderate interest. She asked to be looped in after hearing about the project secondhand, and has since sent two unprompted emails with ideas. Nobody put her on the original stakeholder list — she added herself. Worth a "monitor" placement now, but watch this one: self-selected interest often grows.
7. Priya's deputy, Tom — incoming. Not yet a stakeholder, but Priya mentioned offhand that her role is being restructured next quarter and Tom may absorb parts of it. The reorg risk:your sponsor, the one clean "manage closely" entry on this map, may not hold that role in eight weeks. Map Tom now as a future high-power unknown, even though there's nothing to plot yet — waiting until the reorg is announced means starting his relationship from zero at the worst possible time.
Where the judgment calls actually are
Three of these seven are easy — Priya, Marcus, and Jon read the same way regardless of who's doing the mapping. The other four are where mapping stops being data entry and starts being interpretation.
Dave's absence and Renata's absence look identical on paper — both are "didn't show up to calls." They mean opposite things. Dave's silence plus visible ownership of the broken process reads as avoidance of a project that might expose his team's current process. Renata's silence plus downstream questions reads as someone gathering information before deciding whether to intervene. Attendance alone can't tell them apart — you need the secondary signal (what happens after the meeting) to place either of them correctly.
What the map looks like once it's honest
"Manage closely" isn't just Priya anymore. It's Priya, Dave (pending a direct conversation about why he's not showing up), and Renata (despite never having spoken to her directly). "Keep informed" includes Marcus, who has no formal authority but real downstream influence over whether the thing you build actually gets used. And the map has an asterisk next to Priya's name — a note that her box is temporary, tied to a reorg that hasn't happened yet.
None of this comes from a single kickoff conversation. It comes from watching what happens after meetings, noticing who asks questions through intermediaries, and treating a stakeholder who never appears on a call as a data point instead of a non-entity. If you want the process for gathering these signals in the first place — who to ask, what questions surface this kind of information — that's covered separately; this is what the finished output looks like once you've done it on a real, imperfect account.