Driving Business Outcomes with Impact Mapping

Impact Mapping is a technique for strategic planning. It aligns team activities with business objectives by communicating assumptions. Impact mapping is a technique for better understanding how you can influence business outcomes. With impact mapping, you go beyond a formal requirements document; instead, you try to work out what impacts the business is trying to make. Do they want to increase sales? Is their goal to increase market share? Do they want to enter a new market? They may want to increase engagement to create loyal customers with a higher lifetime value.

Impact mapping is fast, visual and collaborative. It makes it easy to engage people from various roles and backgrounds, expose hidden assumptions and document important decisions. It provides just enough structure to facilitate effective planning and prioritisation, but does not get in the way with complicated syntax or bureaucracy.

Once you understand the impact the business is trying to make, you can play a more effective role in helping them to achieve it. Impact mapping is a very informal technique. You create mind‐map-like diagrams that stress crucial business information. You work with the business so that, like knowledge crunching, it is a collaborative exercise that helps to build up a shared vision for the product. On many software projects, the developers only get the lower tiers of an impact map. What the business thinks they need and how they feel the developers should achieve it. You can unwind their assumptions and what they want to do with an impact map. And then, you can use your technical expertise to suggest superior alternatives they would never have considered.

Impact mapping is a collaborative technique that helps identify crucial business information. Product features describe a group of behaviors that the system supports. Thus, impact describes the outcome of a solution. The steps between are called deliverables. Impacts are not product features. Better mobile search isn’t an impact but a deliverable. Being able to find information faster is a better behavior change to describe. How you agree with the client about what must be done and, more importantly, what needs to be done has an enormous impact on the success of your development.

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

[²]: Impact Mapping