Aligning Business Objectives and Development Efforts

Impact Mapping is a strategic planning technique. It prevents organizations from getting lost while building products and delivering projects. Impact Mapping communicates assumptions, helping teams align their activities with business objectives.

Impact Mapping is a technique that helps development teams to align with the business. Impact Mapping enables you to understand what you want to do with a project without getting into the details.

Why is the team engaged in the efforts? Why is the team doing all this (rewrite)? What is the Goal we’re trying to achieve? Identify a clear business goal with metrics to measure progress. Who are the actors or different stakeholders in the project? Who is going to be impacted by this Goal? How will the team support those people? Can they help the team achieve the Goal? The higher-level definition of what the team is committing to deliver.

Make the backlog hierarchical. Organizing the backlog into several tiers allows teams to reduce the number of things while providing a big-picture view. We only break down significant items into smaller ones once we need to populate the lower levels with more information.

When an impact is on the map, a stakeholder believes that the change in customer behavior will lead to the business goal. When describing the purpose of a milestone — the first level of the map — focus on the problem to be solved, not the solution. When representing the actors — the second level — think about who can impact the outcome. To describe the impacts — the third level of the map — think about behavior changes you are trying to influence.

Impacts are not product features. For example, better mobile search isn’t an impact but a deliverable. Finding information faster is a good behavior change to describe instead. Then treat them as options, not as commitments. Another option for prioritization is to focus on a single segment first and improve in that area. Change cues to reduce the chance of users ignoring them; create associations between the user’s existing work tasks and the product. Avoid concurrent signals that seek actions. Build up trust, and improve initial usage experiences. Help users build habits that will make them skip the evaluation and timing parts of the funnel. Provide clear guides and action plans, small wins, and reduce the risk of failure.

A good strategy for dealing with such issues is to discuss global concerns once per milestone. This leads to a framework that applies to all work during that delivery phase so that the problems do not need to be considered for each story.

Create a pyramid of quality based on Maslow’s hierarchy of needs, and add an acceptance criterion to each level. The questions that define the pyramid levels (bottom-up) are: Does it work? (functionality and deployment) Does it work well? (security, performance, capacity) Is it usable? (usability, design) Is it useful? (behavior changes, user-level goals) Is it successful?

The delivery team wastes a lot of time tracking and managing unnecessary items — time that could have been invested more. Consider creating a checklist of expectations for global concerns such as usability or security. Small, easy wins always get prioritized over complex tasks. Activity metrics are great for measuring whether the team is working well together or not, but they can’t show real progress. Measuring progress with an activity creates a wrong set of incentives for prioritization. It’s straightforward to hide scope creep and unnecessary work in a pile of several dozen items. The story card hell problem starts when a team only has one level of abstraction in their backlog — when the backlog becomes linear.

Managing all this information often puts a lot of strain on product managers, who need more time to deal with day-to-day activities. When market opportunities change, the business stakeholders face a severe dilemma. Keeping the project would deliver outdated or useless features or delay work on something more significant.

[¹]: Fifty Quick Ideas To Improve Your User Stories

[²]: Impact Mapping: Making a big impact with software products and projects