Impact Mapping: How to Find the Shortest Path to Achieving Your Business Goals
The best way to approach project development is not to pursue every possible feature your competitors have. Instead, the key is to focus on the features that will make the most significant impact on your own business goals. That’s where Impact Mapping comes into play and Scrile team can help bring your ideas to life in the most effective way.
Once our customers launch their websites based on the Scrile Connect platform, their project development teams face the same challenge: how to align goals of all stakeholders without turning the project into a Frankenstein that is trying to please everyone? Product managers, business owners and sponsors need to focus their efforts towards a particular goal, restructure initiatives that are already in place and communicate new ideas effectively. Every decision is even harder if you are the only stakeholder and have to think of everything alone.
The best way to approach project development is not to pursue every possible feature your competitors have. Instead, the key is to focus on the features that will make the most significant impact on your own business goals.
How to see the bigger picture, align your business goals and create a working strategy so that the final product hits the market like a hurricane? That’s where Impact Mapping comes into play and Scrile team can help bring your ideas to life in the most effective way.
What is Impact Mapping
Impact mapping is a strategic planning approach that lets your team set business goals and visualize the way and the means to achieve these goals. This tool is used to determine which features you should include into the product roadmap and prioritize them so that your project roadmap is grounded in your business objectives.
By asking the 4 simple questions (Why? Who? How? What?), impact mapping quickly illustrates the path from the primary goal to a specific feature by identifying the relevant actors, how they can help achieve the intended goal, and what functionality is required for them to perform those desirable actions.
What makes impact mapping different from other feature planning strategies is that it explains precisely why you include a feature on the roadmap. That way, everything you do always aligns with your company goals and user needs.
What Purpose Impact Mapping Serves
Impact mapping is an attempt to achieve the following three purposes:
- Strategic planning
- Defining the quality
- Roadmap agreement – mutual agreement to achieve the business objectives by iterative releases to measure progress at frequent intervals.
A completed impact map can serve multiple purposes. First of all, the business impact can be illustrated and provide a clear relationship between investments in project development and the attainment of set goals. On the project development side, the features are all tied directly back to goals. This prevents any feature that does not directly improve the chances of successfully accomplishing the intended objective.
Why Your Project Needs Impact Mapping
Companies often get so caught up in building a solution that they forget what problem they were trying to solve in the first place. Products morph over time and the end result does not always map back to the original goal, which can lead to product-market fit issues or bloated products with unnecessary features for their core purpose.
Impact mapping links your project to the real world and shows what impacts your deliverables will make. It helps to specific features that can be passed to the development team and at this point, you can be sure that you are implementing features that will certainly make an impact.
Conclusion
Impact mapping is a helpful tool that can be used both at the beginning stages of product definition, during ongoing development when trying to figure out what to build next, or as a sanity check within a product development cycle.
It shifts the focus back to the “why” from the “what” so project managers are able to escape from feature-centric thinking and make prioritization decisions based on the intended end results.
If you like the tool but are hesitant to implement it, our team can help you out. We at Scrile offer free impact mapping services for projects based on our IT solutions to build consensus within your business about what the project is trying to achieve and how it is planning to get there in the most effective way.
Feel free to contact us to receive professional advice on impact mapping from one of our experienced managers.
