Impact mapping with a little twist!
By: Chinar Khartadkar
Tags: Business Strategy, Impact, Product Development, Product Management, Product Design

This is an Impact Map — Source https://www.plays-in-business.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/07/ImageMapping-ThePath-1024x468.jpg

The method in question is called ‘Impact mapping’, I have recently stumbled across this method and cannot believe why it is not spoken about as much, So I have decided to become a missionary for the same and do my bit to get it out to the masses, so let’s dive right in.

Who can benefit from impact mapping ?

Impact mapping is a part of the Ideation process of a software Product/Project life cycle so everyone involved in the same will benefit (mostly seniors) i.e. the product owners, sponsors, business stakeholders, product/project oversight, quality management and delivery.

What is impact mapping ?

Impact mapping is a technique introduced by Gojko Adzic which ensures that every product/feature built is always aligned with the business vision/goals/objectives of the organisation and ensures that everyone involved in its success are on the same page and work as missionaries not mercenaries. It also ensures that NO time or money is wasted due to wrong assumptions, lack of focus or poor communication of objectives. It helps in creation of better plans and roadmaps with aligned business and delivery. Resulting in the creation of impactful software.

Why should Impact mapping be used ?

As people associated with building a product/project and its success, the single most important things we are trying to do is solve a user’s problem by generating user value while strategically achieving business value, but I have seen that in our scurry we (the multiple teams involved in product success) often lose sight and aren’t aligned to business objectives/goals and/or the overall business vision and mission, I can’t stress enough on the fact that if everything we build doesn’t help us achieve our planned business goals then we are essentially moving in circles and are bound to fail, which many of the products/projects/softwares do, they die a slow agonizing death costing a loss precious time and in turn a loss of billions of dollars. Checkout some of the major products/projects that have failed due to the same reasons.

Impact mapping makes sure that the business and delivery are always aligned.

Okay now that you know the basics you might be wondering, Why is it titled ‘Impact mapping with a little twist’ ?

It is a little different from the impact map introduced by the Gojko Adzic, You’ll know the ‘Why’ when you see it, more to follow.

How to create an Impact map ?

Let me now take you through each section of the impact map

As defined by Gojko Adzic an impact map is a visualization of scope and underlying assumptions created collaboratively by senior technical and business people, it is a mind map grown during a discussion facilitated by answering the following questions :

Why ? Who ? How ? Why ? (I have added this extra ‘why’ which is the little twist) What ?

Now let’s take a deeper look at each of the above questions.

Why?

This is the center of the Impact map, it is the business goal/objective the product/project is meant to achieve, this always needs to be tied back to the overall vision and mission of the organization, It may sound like common sense to know this upfront and it in some cases it may be documented but more often than not it is in the back of some senior stakeholder’s mind. It is key for the delivery teams to always keep the business goals in mind inorder to make good decisions with regards to scope, cost & timelines, A product/project is considered successful if it delivers a business goal even if in doing so the scope has changed from what was originally envisioned, but if a product/project achieves the exact scope and fails to address the business goal then it will be considered a failure.

Quick guide to good goal and objective setting — They should be SMART : Specific, Measurable, Action-oriented, Realistic and Timely, the key here is ‘Measurable’ if you get this right the rest are easier to pin down. Who?

This refers to the actors involved, you need to ask questions like : Who can produce the desired effect? Who can obstruct it? Who are the consumers of our product? Who will be impacted by it? These are the actors who can influence the outcome. In order to deliver value to our users, first we need to know who they are and what value are they looking for from our products, We also need to consider the others who can make decisions that influence the success of the product, We do not want any surprises mid work i.e. a new actor appears from nowhere and everything changes or someone with sufficient decision making influence just stops the development in its tracks. By mapping different actors we can prioritize better for example focus on satisfying the most important actors first. How?

This sets the actors in the perspective of our business goals, by answering the following questions: How should our actor’s behaviour change? How can they help us achieve the goal? How can they obstruct us from succeeding? These are the impacts we are trying to create. Think about the Jobs To Be Done instead of focusing on features, Don’t list everything an actor might want to achieve, List only the impacts that help you move in the right direction towards the central goal. Ideally show a change in actor behaviour, not just the behaviour, So instead of ‘selling tickets’, Say ‘selling tickets five times faster’ Why?

This is the twist referred to in the title of this article, this ‘Why’ refers to the constraints the actors are facing in performing the ideal activity required for achieving our goals and objectives, We need to ask the question ‘Why are they not able to perform the activity as described in the ‘How’ ?’ What are the problems our actors are facing in performing the ideal activity?, This extra Why has been introduced in the impact map to facilitate clarity of the problem/constraints/blockers that are deterring our actors from performing the ideal activity and helping us achieve the business goal, because in order to build the correct solution we first need to identify the correct problem and this step helps in achieving the same. What?

And now the fun part, what features can we build to solve the identified problems? What can we do as an organisation or delivery teams to support the actors in accomplishing their ideal task? You can thus brainstorm and list down all the features which would then help in overcoming the constraints. The impact map thus helps us understand the clear business values of the features and in turn helps us launch something valuable sooner by choosing the shortest path to do so. It also helps us sieve out features that do not really contribute to any impact for a particular goal. Impact mapping helps connect feature suggestions to the goal and allows us to scrutinize our decisions better and re-evaluate them in light of new information available through delivery. It’s important to understand that we don’t need to go into a lot of detail here as this is a list of high level features and we need to treat them as options as you don’t need to deliver everything that’s on this list.

We can easily use the Eric Ries’ Lean Startup tactics here, He first talks about intentionally testing assumptions, We already have our right set of assumptions to choose from i.e. the feature which provides the shortest path to achieve the goal, which we can test through what Eric Ries calls the build-measure-learn cycle (small iterative deliveries to support learning) So with any feature that we choose to deliver we can measure if the market responds at expected rates, if yes we continue to expand this area, if not we decide on the next feature which helps us achieve the business goal.

Impact stories

Impact mapping can be used to create impact stories, which can be used either as a charter or an idea backlog for your product, as it has many features directly impacting the goal/vision, the impact stories can be further refined through talking to the end users by creating something known as an experience map (I’ll keep this topic for another article)

As a : Actor

I want : Features

So that I can : Activity

In order to achieve : Vision/Goal/Objective

That brings us to the end of it

Let me leave you with a sample impact map I have created below, but before that some background, the impact map has been created keeping in mind a B2B Saas business model, We are a corporate travel management platform https://business.musafir.com/, Currently one of the best in the UAE market and will soon enter the Indian market as well.

If you want to learn more about impact mapping please log onto https://www.impactmapping.org/

I hope this article has brought some clarity on impact mapping, happy mapping!

The end.