Collaborative Vision Building with Impact Mapping

Answer to the interview question: How do you collaborate with people to identify how to deliver value?

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.

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. 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 valuable technique for teams to focus their efforts in line with business expectations. To apply it, there are four questions to consider that reveal the project’s impact. During an Impact Mapping exercise, it is crucial to ask several questions.

1. Why are we doing this?

It may seem obvious, but many teams skip this step and build unnecessary things.

2. What is the goal we are trying to achieve?

The goal should be connected to something valuable to our stakeholders.

3. Who will be affected by it?

Need to have these people involved in decision-making about the project.

4. How can those people help us achieve the goal?

The group of people changed by the changes or project can either help or hinder the project.

5. What can we do to support them?

Define the necessary actions to support the group’s behavioral change. Defining new requirements can be a straightforward process. The Three Amigos workshop can help clarify some of these questions by bringing in those whom the delivery team will change. Identifying a clear business goal with metrics to measure progress is essential.

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