THE IMPACT MAPPING PLAYBOOK

Aligning work around outcomes instead of just chasing the next feature idea is
one of those things that product teams often want to nail, but rarely get right.
It’s because most of the frameworks we use prioritize tangible rock-solid
features over hard-to-measure effects.

Just look at how obsessed some Scrum teams are with the number of user
stories they can squeeze into a sprint, their velocity, or the number of pre-
de ned feature ideas they have to “re ne” through what I like to call “Alibi
Product Discovery.”

But all this talk about a mythical unicorn called “outcomes” won’t help teams
break the wheel. Instead, they need to be able to connect individual features to
behaviors worth changing and metrics that matter for the business.

Meet Impact Mapping.

Tim Herbig - @herbigt - herbig.co

Impact Mapping: How to focus on outcomes in product management

Impact vs. Outcome vs. Output

First, it’s important to sort out all those terms which often get used
interchangeably in product development.

Let’s start at the top.

An impact metric helps you to describe where you want to be as a company or

business, expressed through a result. It’s often the most high-level, yet most
important metric for the business. In other words, it is a high-level expression
of business health. Of course, the impact can be a North Star Metric, but it can
also be a “simple” business KPI.

As impact metrics are often lagging indicators whose change depends on

many projects/initiatives/events coming together, product teams need
something more tangible to measure their progress. Outcome metrics help a
team know that they got to the place where the business wants to be, by
looking at measurable changes in behavior.

As Josh Seiden puts it , an outcome is “a change in human behavior that

creates value.” And the above-mentioned impact metrics will only change as a
result of speci c customer behaviors coming together. Outcomes are the
measures of these different customer behaviors.

But in order to change those human behaviors, you need to build “stuff.” And
this is where outputs come in. They represent the features or products you will
build, keeping the change in behavior you want to cause in mind. It’s what
product teams cycle through in their sprints and release on an ongoing basis.

Impact Mapping: How to focus on outcomes in product management

Impact Mapping: How to focus on outcomes in product management

Impact metrics:
Where do we want to be, expressed through a result.

Outcome metrics:
How will we know that we got there, by looking at measurable changes in
behavior.

Looking at how drastically different those three terms are, it should become
clear why jumping from high-level business impacts straight into solutions is
so dangerous.

In order to empower product teams to own the decision-making process of

what to build, they need to be aware of different paths to create an impact.
This is where Impact Mapping can unlock empowerment for product teams.

Impact Mapping: How to focus on outcomes in product management

Impact Mapping: How to focus on outcomes in product management

Why use Impact Mapping?

Avoiding jumping from an overarching business goal straight into solutions is
vital for outcome-oriented product management.

The structure of an Impact Map encourages product teams to work through

the map level-by-level, supporting a focus on the immediate next steps.

Impact Mapping is the helpful bridge product teams need to connect the two
things executives and stakeholders care the most about: business impacts and
feature ideas.

In addition, Impact Mapping helps a team to make sense of the ongoing

stream of insights and evidence they collect. Instead of storing user feedback
in a disconnected silo, Impact Mapping allows for putting it into the right
context.

Teams can use it as a landscape of their problem space by treating it as an

evolving element. As soon as a new actor or user behavior “appears,” the
decision of whether it’s worth pursuing can be answered by holding it against
an Impact Map.

Impact Mapping: How to focus on outcomes in product management

Impact Mapping: How to focus on outcomes in product management

What are Impact Mapping Use Cases?

There are two prime examples of situations in which a product team can utilize
Impact Mapping most effectively.

Once, when the existing product/feature landscape needs to be clari ed to

ensure outcome-orientation and strategy alignment of new and existing ideas.
This happens e.g. as part of a quarterly or yearly review and planning session.
The product team can utilize impact mapping to focus the conversation on
goals and blind spots, instead of features. It’s an effective way to point out if
feature ideas don’t contribute to the strategic direction of the company and are
therefore not worth pursuing.

The second scenario is when a product team needs guidance working with the
insights and evidence from their Product Discovery mission. The intent behind
every level of an Impact Map can be perfectly aligned with the continuous and
iterative set of activities a team is working through.

An Impact Map also becomes a useful tool to keep executives and

stakeholders up-to-date regarding the discovery process without causing
“death by PowerPoint.”

Impact Mapping: How to focus on outcomes in product management

 THE IMPACT MAPPING PLAYBOOK

What is Impact Mapping?

Impact Mapping is one of the most effective techniques to help Product Teams
make sense of all the evidence collected and make trade-off decisions.
Originally developed by Gojko Adzic in 2012, I've iterated the framework over
the years to speci cally support Product Discovery activities and outcome-
thinking. At its core, my version of Impact Mapping consists of 5 Levels:

  HY
W
 WHO
 HOW
 WHAT
 WHETHER
A lot of core ideas of his de nition of Impact Mapping still hold true up to this
day. However, based on my experience, I like to introduce a revised version of
Impact Mapping which makes it more effective for Product Teams.

Impact Mapping: How to focus on outcomes in product management

Impact Mapping: How to focus on outcomes in product management

The rst level intents to provide the overall strategic goal you want to
contribute to. This is why it makes sense to use an impact metric to articulate
the WHY. Essentially, this level aims to answer the question of WHY this
opportunity/mission/initiative is worth pursuing.

Besides “justifying” the efforts of a business or a team through this impact

metric, it’s also an important guiding principle for the team to make trade-off
decisions later on.

In order to make the WHY more tangible, articulating the ambition level about
the timing and the difference you seek to create is helpful.

Here are some examples of impact metrics to add to the WHY level of your
Impact Map:

“  Increasing user conversion by 20% in three months”

 “Increase the number of Weekly Active Users by x until the end of the
year”
 “Close 10 Enterprise Contracts within the next 12 Months”
 “Improve Customer Effort Score by 1.5 points until the end of Q4”
Those metrics shouldn’t be treated as dogma, but a representation of the
overall ambition level.

Now it’s time to map out WHO can help you to achieve this goal. This level
helps you to create clarity in which actors play any kind of role in changing the
impact metric.

While it might be easy to list some of the very obvious actors right away,
uncovering second-degree actors is where the magic happens. By digging
deeper into a seemingly mundane interview or survey response, you might be
able to map out actors you haven’t paid attention to before e.g. relatives of
your users, administrative supporting roles, or read-only users which still
matter to your product. So, in short: You don‘t just want to look at actors from
an external perspectives like users or customers, but also including internal
roles which could matter, like stakeholders.

Impact Mapping: How to focus on outcomes in product management

Impact Mapping: How to focus on outcomes in product management

Here are some examples of actors being placed on the WHO level of an Impact
Map:

  he marketing department
T
 Power Users
 Customer Success Agents
 New Users
 Returning Users
 Churned Users
Depending on your mission, different levels of granularity make sense here.
Sometimes it can be enough to differentiate between new users and existing
users. In other cases, however, looking at more nuanced differentiations like
“power users”, “Pro Plan upgrade customers” makes sense.

Here’s where the rst change of my interpretation of Impact Mapping

happens. In the original concept, this level is referred to as the place where the
impacts are put. But based on the shared understanding about impacts and
outcomes we have established earlier, items on this level should be referred to
as outcomes. It still makes sense to call the whole framework Impact Mapping,
as we’re mapping outcomes (and later on outputs) to a bigger impact.

Because at this level, we aim to answer the question of HOW we have to

change the behavior of the actors listed above, in order to change the overall
impact.

This tricky thing is that there’s no place where we can just grab those
outcomes. Instead, the items listed here are the result of running and
interpreting qualitative and quantitative research. People won’t tell you how
they have to change their behavior so your company can make more money.

You need to understand their current work ows, pains, and gains, in order to
derive behaviors worth changing. However, you don’t want to focus on all the
behaviors worth changing, but only on those which have a chance of
contributing to the impact.

Impact Mapping: How to focus on outcomes in product management

Impact Mapping: How to focus on outcomes in product management

Here are some examples of actors being placed on the WHO level of an Impact
Map:

I nviting more friends

 Purchasing tickets without calling the call center
 Selling tickets faster
 Creating a real estate exposé from their smartphones
 Responding to customer requests from within Slack
 Help customers to book appointments without calling the studio
Listing the changes and the direction you want to take them (higher vs. lower,
faster vs. slower) is ne during the rough phases of the mapping. Later on,
select and focus on speci c outputs to pursue and add a speci c number to
the corresponding outcomes to measure the success and progress of your
idea.

The secret superpower of an outcome on the HOW level is if you re-frame it as

a challenge for the ideation sessions on Level 4 of the Impact Map:

“How might be [your intent as a team] [actor] [outcome]?”

“How might we enable real estate agents to create a real estate exposé from
their smartphones?”

This should also serve as your litmus test if you’re talking about an actual
outcome or slipped into discussing features already.

Impact Mapping: How to focus on outcomes in product management

Impact Mapping: How to focus on outcomes in product management

Now it’s time to answer the questions WHAT features have the highest chance
of creating this desired change in behavior. While the HOW level can feel
incredibly tough to push through due to the uncertainty and fuzzy-ness,
entering the solution space by thinking about speci c features can feel like a
huge relief. Those features represent the actual output a team might produce
later on.

Write down any existing feature ideas (as long as they contribute to an
outcome) as well as coming up with new ones – aka outputs. For that, product
teams should run cross-functional ideation sessions with stakeholders from
across the company. By embracing re-combination and iterative group
sessions, the WHAT level probably lls up quickly.

Just as with every item on the Impact Map, it’s important that the pure
presence on the map doesn’t guarantee execution. Instead, it’s more about
creating potential paths worth pursuing. When wrapping-up an ideation
session with your team, this might be important to mention to manage
expectations the right way.

Here are some examples of actors being placed on the WHAT level of an
Impact Map:

  nline ticket sales page

O
 Mobile homepage with a purchase form
 Sign re-selling contracts App
 Slack integration
 CRM iOS App
 Travel Booking Chatbot

Impact Mapping: How to focus on outcomes in product management

Impact Mapping: How to focus on outcomes in product management

Here comes the second addition to Impact Mapping which is part of those
main changes I made to the framework. The goal of this level is to answer the
question of WHETHER a solution is actually worth implementing.

This process is commonly known as validation and includes running qualitative

and quantitative experiments looking at the various aspects of your idea.

After prioritizing those items of the WHAT level using a lightweight framework
like ICE Scoring, you should start running experiments. During that phase, it’s
important to look at the aspects of validity, usability, and feasibility of your idea.

The process of coupling multiple experiments to create a holistic perspective

on your idea is also called “Experiment Pairing”.

  rototype Usability Interviews

P
 Fake Door Testing of a Premium Upgrade
 Wizard of Oz MVP for a new statistical calculation
 Kano Model survey illustrating the new feature
 Spike implementation of a Slack integration
The results of your experiment should tie back to your WHAT items and
eliminate or boost them, depending on your new insights.

Impact Mapping: How to focus on outcomes in product management

 THE IMPACT MAPPING PLAYBOOK

Connecting the Dots

The litmus test for checking an idea against the content of an impact map is to
see whether you can form a sentence (which makes sense) across all levels,
explaining why you want to pursue a feature idea.

This way of thinking forces you to be clear about how this idea came to life and
why experiment results support it.

You can also use your impact map to check new ideas against the pieces of
evidence you have in place. Does this idea help to create a change in behavior
we have prioritized? Not sure? Let’s prioritize validation around it and place it
as a bet on the WHAT level. Did a new user segment emerge from continuous
research activities? Great, time to expand the map and discuss this discovery
as a potential priority for the team.

Keep the map visible to remind yourself and your team of what you have
accomplished, and as an evidence locker to revisit and expand over time.
Because after all, that’s what product discovery is about — Gathering evidence
to support our decision-making processes.

THE IMPACT MAPPING PLAYBOOK BY TIM HERBIG

 THE IMPACT MAPPING PLAYBOOK

VIDEO: Putting Outcomes into Practice

In this talk from the Product Lessons Learned Conference 2020, I present
Impact Mapping as an effective way for Product Teams to move through the
Problem Space and transition the theoretic principles of working towards
Outcomes into practice.

THE IMPACT MAPPING PLAYBOOK BY TIM HERBIG