Every company has a dominant function that disproportionately shapes decisions — sales-driven, marketing-driven, engineering-driven, or PE/finance-driven. Identifying which function is dominant at a given company determines who actually belongs on a product's stakeholder list: in a sales-driven org, sales leadership's priorities carry outsized weight regardless of formal authority; in a finance/PE-driven org, financial stakeholders do.
Use this taxonomy together with The Matrix: Mapping Real (Informal) Power vs. the Org Chart — the dominant function tells you where to look for Power Players, the Matrix tells you who they are once you look.
Concrete, observable evidence for identifying which function actually holds power at a company (sales-, marketing-, engineering-, or PE/finance-driven), beyond asking who officially reports where:
Once the dominant function is identified this way, make sure someone from it is on the stakeholder list — the Stakeholder Canvas is the tool used to track this.
The "Rule of 40" (a SaaS metric balancing growth rate against profit margin) shows up disproportionately in PE-owned companies, and its presence is a tell: if a company is PE-owned and organized around metrics like the Rule of 40, finance is very likely the dominant function, and finance stakeholders should be prioritized accordingly.
Из тем: Stakeholder Power and Trust