Software ecosystems have become ubiquitous for developing and delivering platform-based software products, requiring organisations to collaborate with diverse internal and external stakeholders to create and sustain ecosystem value. While stakeholder management is well established in project management and requirements engineering, existing approaches provide limited guidance for identifying, evaluating, and prioritising stakeholders within the dynamic and interdependent context of software ecosystems. This research addresses this gap by developing a reference process model for software ecosystem stakeholder management. This approach supports the selection and prioritization of stakeholders according to ecosystem strategy and organizational capacity, enabling practitioners to determine which stakeholders are relevant and when stakeholder identification is sufficient.

The proposed process model guides practitioners through a structured sequence of activities, including defining ecosystem strategy, identifying known stakeholders defining ecosystem roles, establishing stakeholder assessment criteria, defining measurable stakeholder attributes, weighting stakeholder importance, assessing stakeholders, and selecting key stakeholders. Rather than prescribing a universal definition of a key stakeholder, the model enables organisations to tailor assessment criteria to their ecosystem strategy while maintaining a systematic and repeatable decision-making process. The process is supported by practical artefacts, including stakeholder logs, role documents, and assessment templates, designed to facilitate adoption in industrial settings.

The process model was developed through design science research and informed by an extensive review of the literature together with empirical insights gathered from software ecosystem practitioners. Its design emphasises flexibility, transparency, and repeatability, allowing organisations to adapt stakeholder assessment to different platform products, ecosystem structures, and strategic objectives. By shifting the focus from stakeholder influence alone towards ecosystem roles and strategy-driven assessment, the research provides both a theoretical contribution to software ecosystem stakeholder management and a practical method that organisations can use to identify and engage the stakeholders most critical to achieving long-term ecosystem success.