Stakeholder Interview Guide Template
Five documents and three sheets built around one number: how many of the people who hold a view on each question have actually answered it.
Free download · No account needed
Interview Guide by Role · Warehouse supervisor · v3
Forty minutes, six blocks, in this order
| Block | Minutes | What it is for | Refs |
|---|---|---|---|
| Framing | 2 | Who commissioned this, what it covers, that nothing is attributed by name, that you can stop at any point. | — |
| Their job | 5 | What they actually do, not what the role description says. Establishes which questions apply. | — |
| Walkthrough | 12 | One recent real instance, start to finish. Always before the programme questions. | — |
| Programme questions | 16 | The numbered set, same references in every guide, so the answers are comparable. | QC-01, QC-03, QC-07 |
| Not applicable | 0 | Marked in the guide before fielding, which lowers the target rather than the count. | QC-02, QC-06 |
| Who else | 3 | Who else should be asked this, and who disagrees with you. The highest yield minute in the hour. | — |
The walkthrough comes first for a reason. Ask a general question cold and you get the documented process. Ask it after twelve minutes on last Tuesday's order and you get what happened on Tuesday.
The references are the point of the margin column. Every guide carries the same numbered questions, so an answer given by a warehouse supervisor and an answer given by a store manager land in the same row of the matrix and can be counted together.
Version 3 because QC-08 was added in week two. Everyone interviewed on v1 and v2 gets a five minute follow up rather than being counted as covered.
Search this and you get question banks. Four topic areas, a discussion guide, a note-taking canvas, thirty questions to adapt by role. All useful, and none of it is the part that fails. What fails is arriving at the write-up with twenty conversations and no way to say how many people a finding rests on. Six people said the handover is broken is a claim about six people. Six of nine is a claim about the organisation.
So the unit here is the question, not the interview. The coverage matrix holds one row per question with the roles that hold a view, the target, how many were actually asked, how many agreed, how many dissented, how many could not say, and who was never asked at all. Could not say stays in the denominator: three of eight buyers unable to name who approves a markdown is the finding, and it is the answer that gets dropped first.
Targets get set before the first interview, which is the ordering that matters. OMB's standards for statistical surveys require a nonresponse bias analysis whenever a response rate lands under 80 percent, and require it planned in advance where the expected rate already is. None of that arithmetic transfers to fourteen interviews. The discipline does: set the target first, then notice the shortfall in writing while another conversation can still be booked. Open the pack in River once you have indexed the client's data room, or take the Word documents and CSV sheets blank.
What's in the pack
Question Coverage Matrix
One row per question, a target set before fielding, and columns for asked, agreed, dissented, could not say and never asked.
Theme Register
No theme without a count and a denominator, the dissent named, and a column for what the theme cannot support.
Interview Schedule and Tracker
Guide version per interview, consent recorded and how, and a logged-to-matrix flag so you know whether the counts are current.
Interview Guide by Role
Six blocks in a fixed order, with the walkthrough before the numbered questions and the same references carried in every role's guide.
Asking a Question Enough Times
How the target gets set, the four coverage verdicts, and why a shortfall of two can be worse than a shortfall of five.
Consent and Confidentiality Note
Built to the shape federal informed consent rules require: key information first, and nothing asking the participant to waive anything.
Programme Conventions
Eight decisions to settle before interview one, including what counts as an interview and who ever sees the interview level record.
Synthesis Format
The seven parts every theme takes, and the four sentence paragraph on coverage that goes above all of them.
How to use it
- 1
Open in River, or take it blank
Open the pack in River and send it the stakeholder list, or download the Word documents and CSV sheets and run the programme yourself.
- 2
Set a target per question
Eight to twelve numbered questions, each with the roles that hold a view and how many of them you intend to reach. Anything only one person can answer becomes a briefing instead.
- 3
Log against questions, not into files
Each transcript gets posted question by question, so the count moves as the interview happens rather than being reconstructed from write-ups at the end.
- 4
Check coverage while you can still fix it
Run the check at the halfway point. It names who is missing, ranks the repair by what the next conversation buys, and flags the questions one person alone can settle.
Frequently asked questions
Is this template free?
Yes. The zip is Word documents and CSV sheets, no account and no card. Edit with AI is the optional half: the agent writes the question set, sets the targets, builds the role guides and logs each transcript against the matrix. Other packs sit in the template library.
What format are the downloaded files?
Word (.docx) for the five documents and CSV (.csv) for the three sheets, zipped together. Excel, Numbers and Google Sheets open the matrix, the register and the tracker straight off the download. Nothing needs converting first.
How is this different from a list of interview questions?
A question bank tells you what to ask, and a bank that scores each question against what it produced last time is where the set should come from. This tells you how many times each was asked this round, and who is still missing. Deciding which hypotheses justify an interview round at all is the hypothesis and workplan pack.
How many people is enough for one question?
It depends on who is missing rather than on the count. The pack sets a target per question before fielding, then grades each one as analysable, analysable with a caveat, not analysable, or withdrawn. Five of six is not analysable when the missing person owned the thing you are asking about.
Does it work from recordings and transcripts?
Yes, and from notes where somebody declined recording, in which case every quote is marked as a paraphrase. If you want a single conversation turned into quotes with their timecodes rather than counted across a programme, working up one transcript does that. A group session is a different write-up: a workshop record built from the board photographs keeps what the room parked.
Will it name who said what?
No. The matrix and the register carry roles and interview references, never names, and it flags any quote whose content would identify the speaker even without one. That is the promise the consent note makes to participants, so the artifacts have to keep it. Once fielding is done, clearing each verbatim against the org chart decides which quotes reach the deck.
What does 'Edit with AI' actually do?
It signs you up, installs this pack as a private workspace of your own, and puts the agent in front of an empty coverage matrix. Send the stakeholder list and what the engagement has to settle, and the question set, the targets and the role guides come back before you book anybody.
Know what twenty interviews establish
Take the Word documents and CSV sheets blank, or open this exact pack in River and send it the stakeholder list before you book anybody.
Edit with AI