A guide to impact mapping

As a product manager, you work with a range of different stakeholders, and one of your key tasks is to bring everyone into alignment on the product vision, priorities, and goals you want to achieve. While there are multiple ways to accomplish this, impact mapping is a visual and lightweight technique to ensure that you’re truly making an impact with the product you’re building.

This article explores impact mapping and how it can drive alignment across the product development lifecycle. It also shows how impact mapping can be used with other techniques to capture the journey of discovering problems, running experiments, and building a product.

What is impact mapping?

Impact mapping is a lightweight, collaborative planning technique for teams that want to make a big impact with software products. It was developed by Godjo Adzic in his 2012 book “Impact Mapping,” and it highlights four layers:

• Goal — What is it that you want to achieve?
• Actor — Who are the actors impacted by solving this goal?
• Impact — What would this goal achieve?
• Deliverable — How do you make sure you achieve that? And through what means?

Once you have completed this exercise, you can always use it as a reference and guide to keep everyone on track with the goal you want to achieve.

Consider the following example. You’re working on building a budget planning and forecasting tool for the top management in your company. Your main goal is to prepare the tool for the upcoming planning period and offer your users a simple, fast way of planning their budgets and understanding connections between planned numbers and their impact on revenue and margins.

You know your users are business people who work with numbers and sometimes use Excel. One of the developers keeps coming up with improvement ideas, which almost always differ from how you would do things in Excel. This makes sense from his perspective because he hates Excel and thinks it should be decommissioned.

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In a situation like this, you might explain why that isn’t a good idea and hope that they won’t get mad. But if you had done impact mapping, you could refer them back to the map to show the goals you’re after and what your users want. By doing this, your developer would see the importance of Excel for your user base.

The elements of an impact map

To help you better understand impact maps, let’s look at each element of the impact map and provide some guiding questions to help you fill in your own.

• Goal (Why?) — Decide the main goal that your product/solution aims to achieve. You need to ensure that it aligns with the business objectives and that it’s measurable
• Actors (Who?) — As a next step, identify the key actors who can influence the outcome. To get the answer to this one, perform a stakeholder mapping exercise where you map direct and indirect stakeholders and users. You should also know who your persona is and use that input to guide your impact map. Ask yourself questions such as:
  • Who can produce the desired effect?
  • Who can hinder it?
  • Who are the consumers or users of our product?
  • Who’ll be impacted by it?
• Impacts (What?) — You want to define how the goal ties to the actors. Answer questions such as:
  • How should our actors’ behavior change?
  • How can they help achieve the goal?
  • How can they obstruct or prevent us from succeeding?
• Deliverables (How?) — The last step is the deliverables. These can be features or organizational activities. You need to a response to:
  • How can we support the required impacts as an organization or a delivery team?

Why should you use impact mapping?

An impact map encourages teams to focus on outcomes rather than outputs. It involves identifying the actor and the impact first and then figuring out how to achieve it through specific features. This approach helps prioritize what’s important.

Furthermore, an impact map places each deliverable in the context of the impact it supports, making it an effective tool for aligning multiple stakeholders and fostering collaboration toward the same goal. It also serves as a risk management exercise by considering both positive and negative impacts on the outcome, helping to identify potential risks that may have been overlooked.

How to create an impact map (step-by-step guide) with an example

Now, let’s look at creating an impact Map using an example. Assume you want to build a performance management solution for your IT organization to drive employee growth and ensure they get the necessary support:

The impact map might look like:

Common pitfalls and how to avoid them

When using an impact map, make sure to avoid the following pitfalls:

• Focusing on outputs, not outcomes — As mentioned multiple times, it’s crucial to focus on outcomes when building the impact map. The outputs or features come last. It’s a common pitfall for teams to focus only on features and not think of the outcome, but luckily, the tool forces you not to overlook it
• Vague goals — You should pay attention to the goals you define. It’ll only help you focus the impact map if they’re clear and measurable. Similarly, having too many actors can also dilute your impact map. Should this be the case, take a moment and prioritize the main actors
• Ignoring negative impacts — Pay attention to not ignore the negative impacts. I like that it forces you to think of the negative impacts through its design. This is a beneficial exercise, as it helps you identify opportunities or quality attributes you may have missed
• Lack of iteration — Another common mistake teams tend to make is to create the impact map and then forget about it or not iterate on it. As products evolve, so do the actor’s contexts, interests and impacts, so it’s important to revisit your impact map at least every six months or whenever radical changes happen

Conclusion

Although you have a lot of tools in your toolbox, impact mapping is a simple yet effective tool which helps you align stakeholders on outcomes, rather than outputs. As an added bonus, it also enables the identification of negative impacts and risks. Make sure to iterate on it at least twice a year, and share it with your teams and stakeholders as a reminder of what you’re working towards.

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