Determining Stakeholder Values

Once stakeholders are identified, the next step is understanding what each one actually values about the product — not just what they ask for, but what underlying outcome matters to them. Elicitation techniques (interviews, surveys, workshops) are the tools used to draw this out, since stakeholders don't always volunteer their real priorities unprompted.

What gets captured here becomes the baseline a BA leans on later when requirements compete for limited time, budget, or attention — knowing that one stakeholder group values speed above all else, while another values data accuracy, gives the BA a defensible basis for prioritization decisions instead of guessing or defaulting to whoever asked most recently.

Study focus: a scenario where two requirements conflict and the BA has to recommend which to prioritize is often testing whether you can trace the decision back to previously-elicited stakeholder values, not just raw feature popularity.