Impact Mapping

1. Impact Mapping: Aligning Business and Delivery

Impact mapping helps to create better plans and roadmaps that ensure alignment of business and delivery, and are easily adaptable to change.

Bridge the gap. Impact mapping is a strategic planning technique designed to bridge the communication gap between business objectives and software delivery. It helps organizations avoid building products that miss the mark by ensuring that everyone involved understands the underlying assumptions and goals. This alignment reduces wasted effort and scope creep, focusing teams on delivering value that directly contributes to business outcomes.

Visual collaboration. The method promotes collaborative strategic planning, bringing together senior technical and business people to create a shared understanding. By visualizing the relationships between deliverables, impacts, actors, and goals, impact mapping facilitates better decision-making and adaptability in the face of change. It's not just about shipping software; it's about making a real impact.

Fits current trends. Impact mapping fits nicely into several current trends in software product management and release planning, including goal-oriented requirements engineering, frequent iterative delivery, agile and lean software methods, lean startup product development cycles, and design thinking.

2. The Four Core Questions: Why, Who, How, What

An impact map is a visualisation of scope and underlying assumptions, created collaboratively by senior technical and business people.

Mind-map structure. Impact mapping revolves around answering four core questions that form the structure of a mind map: Why (the goal), Who (the actors), How (the impacts), and What (the deliverables). This structure ensures that all aspects of a project are considered in relation to each other, creating a clear and coherent plan. The collaborative nature of the process ensures that diverse perspectives are incorporated.

Interconnected elements. The "Why" sits at the center, representing the business goal. The "Who" identifies the actors who can influence the outcome. The "How" describes the desired behavioral changes or impacts. The "What" lists the deliverables or features that support those impacts. This interconnectedness helps teams understand the rationale behind each deliverable.

Dynamic visualization. By visualizing these elements, impact mapping provides a dynamic roadmap that can be easily adapted as new information becomes available. It's not a static plan but a living document that evolves with the project, ensuring that the team remains focused on the most important objectives.

3. Goals: The "Why" Behind Every Project

Knowing why we're doing something is the key to making good decisions about cost, scope and timelines, both at the start and later when things change.

Central importance. The "Why" question, representing the project's goal, is at the heart of impact mapping. Defining a clear and measurable goal is crucial for aligning the team and making informed decisions about scope, cost, and timelines. Without a well-defined goal, projects can easily lose focus and deliver features that don't contribute to business objectives.

SMART goals. Good goals tend to be SMART: Specific, Measurable, Action-oriented, Realistic, and Timely. They should focus on the problem to be solved, not the solution, and should have an obvious link to money for commercial products and organizations. Examples include "Starting to trade in Brazil by March next year" or "Increasing user conversion by 20% in three months."

Guide decision-making. By keeping the goal at the center of the map, impact mapping ensures that everyone knows why they are doing something. This helps teams align their activities better, identify true requirements, and design better solutions. The goal serves as a constant reference point for evaluating decisions and prioritizing tasks.

4. Actors: Identifying Key Influencers

To deliver high-quality results, we first have to understand who these people are, and what kind of value they are looking for from our products or project outcomes.

People matter. The "Who" question focuses on identifying the actors who can influence the project's outcome, including end-users, decision-makers, and stakeholders. Understanding their needs, goals, and preferences is essential for delivering high-quality results. Software doesn't work in a vacuum; it interacts with people who have their own agendas.

Three types of actors:

• Primary actors: whose goals are fulfilled
• Secondary actors: who provide services
• Off-stage actors: who have an interest in the behaviors

Prioritize work. By mapping out different actors, we can prioritize work better – for example focusing on satisfying the most important actors first. Be specific and avoid generic terms such as ‘users’ – different categories of users might have different needs, and not all users of a system might be important to consider for a particular project.

5. Impacts: Desired Behavioral Changes

By listing impacts on the second level of a map, we consider the desired changes in the behaviour of actors.

Behavioral changes. The "How" question explores the desired changes in the behavior of the identified actors. These impacts represent how the actors can help achieve the project's goal or how they might obstruct it. Focusing on behavioral changes leads to better plans and helps with prioritization.

Focus on business activities. Impacts are not product features. Avoid listing software ideas here, focus on business activities. Ideally show a change in actor behavior, not just the behavior. Show how the activity is different from what is currently possible. So instead of just ‘selling tickets’, say ‘selling tickets five times faster’.

Prioritization. The hierarchical nature of the map clearly shows who creates an impact and how that contributes to the goal. This clear visualization allows us to decide which impacts best contribute to the goal and identify the risks; this helps immensely with prioritization.

6. Deliverables: Supporting the Impacts

The third level of an impact map answers the following question: What can we do, as an organisation or a delivery team, to support the required impacts?

Scope and features. The "What" question addresses the deliverables, software features, and organizational activities that support the desired impacts. This level of the impact map puts all the deliverables in the context of the impacts they are supposed to support. This helps with breaking deliverables down into independent chunks that provide clear business value, and helps us launch something valuable sooner.

Options, not commitments. Treat deliverables as options, don't take it for granted that everything listed here will actually be delivered. Don't go into a lot of detail early on, there will be time for that later. List only high-level deliverables. You can break down high-level features into lower-level scope items, such as user stories, spine stories, basic or extension use cases later.

Achieve an impact. Even on software projects, there are often ways of supporting a business activity without building software – sometimes it is cheaper to pay for advertising to recruit new players than spend months rebuilding a system. Consider anything that helps to achieve an impact.

7. Impact Maps: Strategic Planning, Defining Quality, and Roadmap Management

Impact mapping is a great way to communicate assumptions, create plans and align stakeholders for iterative software delivery.

Three key roles. Impact maps serve three key roles: strategic planning, defining quality, and roadmap management. For strategic planning, it engages senior experts to create a shared understanding of scope from a business perspective. For defining quality, it ensures that everyone involved in delivery shares the same understanding of the expected quality of software at a holistic level.

Dynamic roadmap. An impact map communicates scope, goals and priorities, but also assumptions on two levels. The first is that a deliverable will cause a change in behavior of an actor, produce an impact. The second is that once the impact is achieved, the relevant actor will contribute to the overall objectives. This visualization makes impact maps a powerful tool for roadmap management.

Measure and adapt. Once a deliverable is shipped, we can measure the actual changes in actors' behavior and the impact on the overall objective. We can then re-evaluate our strategy and decide whether to continue working on the same part of the map or move on to something else.

8. Adaptive Planning: Build-Measure-Learn

Impact maps can help to facilitate the application of the Palchinsky method.

Feedback and adaptation. Impact maps provide the basis for feedback on assumptions, allowing for adaptive planning. They visualize assumptions so that we can control them, and adapt our plans accordingly. This is crucial because big upfront plans rarely survive contact with reality due to individual variations and local knowledge.

Palchinsky method:

• Variation: seek out new ideas and try new things
• Survivability: try new things out at a scale where failure is survivable
• Selection: seek out feedback and learn from your mistakes as you go along

Lean startup. Impact mapping complements the lean startup ideas nicely by enabling us to clearly visualize assumptions and see the big picture, so that we can decide which experiments are the most valuable to conduct and most in line with overall company goals.

9. Impact Mapping: Solving Common Problems

One of the unique features of impact maps, compared to alternative planning methods, is that they allow us to quickly solve common planning and delivery problems.

Scope creep. Because there is a clear mapping from deliverables to goals, we can measure when the main objective is reached and stop working on it. An impact map demonstrates that no further impacts are needed to achieve our goal. Similarly, maps provide us with a clear view of all the planned software features that support an impact.

Wrong solutions. Because an impact map puts software deliverables in the context of business goals, it is trivially easy to spot solutions looking for a problem, or those that would contribute to a different business objective. By visually grouping together different deliverables that could contribute to the same impact, maps allow us to spot over-complicated solutions and prevent over-engineering.

Ad-hoc prioritization. Without a clear understanding of the business context, it is difficult to know that we're really working on the most important things. Impact maps put features in the context of behavior impacts, allowing stakeholders to relate better to benefits they would get from features and make much better prioritization decisions.

10. Iterative Delivery: Big Picture and Better Prioritization

Impact maps provide the big picture for both business sponsors and technical delivery teams.

Business and delivery. A common cause for the disconnect between business and delivery is that teams iteratively deliver items that are too small to make a difference from a business perspective. Impact maps provide the big picture for both business sponsors and technical delivery teams. They remove the need for major upfront analysis.

Business activities. Impact maps allow us to have a discussion around business activities and impacts (level 2), instead of deliverables and software features (level 3 and beyond). In my experience business users are much better engaged and make much better decisions when the discussion is at that level.

Iterative, not incremental. Impact maps break deliverables down into branches that contribute to individual impacts, and make us think about quick ways to support them, promoting truly iterative delivery.

Last updated: March 10, 2025