Impact mapping - review

Published Jan 6, 2022

The content here is under the Attribution 4.0 International (CC BY 4.0) license

Building software is hard, building software that users love and actually deliver value is even harder. For long, the software industry suffered (and still suffers) for lack of communication between technicians and business, leading to different approaches of how to get them on the same page and build [1].

Even with the advent of the agile manifest it alone, can’t do the job. Tools and techniques are needed to fill in this gap.

Impact mapping is a book that focus on the impact, regardless of the business, and by that, the author means: impact, not features.

Here I will try to highlight what I found interesting about the book and how I can fit that to my daily routine.

NOTE: thanks to Chris Eyre fo introducing the book

Mapping

From the book, the definition of “impact mapping” is:

A visualization of scope and underlying assumptions, created collaboratively by senior technical and business people.

Why

Why an impact mapping?

  • Business are defined in vague terms
  • If a project succeeds in delivering business goal, it is a success from the business perspective

Goals tend to be:

  • Specific
  • Measurable
  • Action-oriented
  • Realistic
  • Timely

Who

  • Who can produce the desired effect?
  • Avoid generic terms

How

How should our actors’ behavior change?

What

What do we do to support the required impacts?

  • The official impactmapping.org has vide resources that helps to digest the content in different sources.

References

  1. [1]G. Adzic and M. Bisset, Impact Mapping: Making a big impact with software products and projects. Provoking Thoughts Limited, 2012.
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