💡 Strategic Planning Technique for Teams
Impact mapping is a technique for better understanding how you can influence business outcomes.
With impact mapping, you go beyond a formal requirements document and work out what impacts the business is trying to make. Do they want to increase sales? Do they want 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 business's goal, you can help it achieve it more effectively.
Impact mapping is a very informal technique. You create mind‐map-like diagrams that stress crucial business information. 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 on meeting business expectations.
Four questions reveal the project's impact. It is crucial to ask several questions during an impact mapping exercise.
1. Why are we doing this? It may seem obvious, but many teams skip this step and build unnecessary things.
2. What goal are we trying to achieve? The goal should be related to something valuable to our stakeholders.
3. Who will be affected by it? We need to have these people involved in the project's decision-making.
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.
The Three Amigos workshop can help clarify some of these questions by introducing those the delivery team will change.
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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.
When working on a project, the main focus should be contributing to business outcomes rather than creating software. This includes increasing sales, market share, or customer engagement.
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