Impact Mapping
Connects goals with actors, impacts, and deliverables.
PURPOSE
Many organizations deliver features without questioning their actual impact on business goals. Impact Mapping ensures that every deliverable has a traceable connection to an overarching goal. It prevents teams from building things that work technically but make no measurable contribution to business success.
HOW TO USE
You start with the business goal and then identify the actors whose behavior change contributes to that goal. For each actor, the desired impacts are defined, and concrete deliverables are derived from them. The results are visualized as a hierarchical mind map structure.
WHAT IT IS
Impact Mapping is a strategic planning framework developed by Gojko Adzic. It maps a four-level hierarchy: Goal, Actors, Impacts, and Deliverables. The representation takes the form of a hierarchical map that makes the causal relationship between business goals and concrete actions visible.
EXAMPLE
Example: Your company wants to increase customer retention by 15%, but the development team is building features without a clear connection to this goal. With Impact Mapping, you start at the goal, identify the relevant actors (existing customers, support team), their desired behavior, and derive concrete deliverables. This way, you only build what truly contributes to the goal.