Impact mapping – how to build it?

There are many methods in agile to significantly improve the project vision (especially at the beginning of a project). The one I’m offering you today is called impact mapping. What is an Impact Mapping?

Before initiating this topic, here are several articles that I have already written that will allow you to quickly create a product vision:

Agile customer journey ?
Product Vision Box
Product Vision Board
Story mapping, how to do

What is Impact Mapping?

Behind this barbaric name of Impact Mapping hides a very simple visual method to set up which aims to improve the vision of the project.

This method is called a method of strategic planning which will aim to situate well the objectives of the project and not to stray from them along the way.

However, we can also use it to explain in a very simple way to the teams what will be this project on which they will work. Visual management can sometimes seem simplistic, but it is really essential for a good understanding.

Make an Impact Mapping

First, we’re going to visually represent (a drawing on the wall works great) our impact map.

For this, we will follow a very simple path to define things. We will also take a simple example in our case: the creation of an ecommerce site.

Objective: We will define the objective that we wish to achieve at this first level.

Who? Next, we’ll define who is affected by the objective we’ve defined.

How? We will define the methods to reach the objective for each of our users.

What? For simplicity, the last step is to purpose solutions for each “how?” which we defined above.

Our example is simplistic but the goal is to well understand the interest of this impact mapping. As you can see, it’s relatively simple to understand visually.

When the product owner presents this type of impact mapping, it will allow the teams to quickly have a good vision of the project. The business teams with whom he works can even take the opportunity to participate in developing it.

Be careful not to make it too complex; in fact, the advantage of this practice is to have a quick and clear vision of the objectives. At this moment, we create the level of a global vision of the project as a “User Journey” would be.

It is often interesting to display these impact mapping on the walls in order to have a good vision of the project we want to go to.

Conclusion Impact Mapping

So, I hope this new method of Impact Mapping will be useful to you one day. Sometimes it’s really hard to start a new project for a product owner cause of their lack of vision.

Also, don’t hesitate to share your tips with us to improve the overall vision of the project.

Useful link: Travailler la vision du produit (french)