Impact mapping

Impact mapping is a planning technique that connects one business goal to the actors who could move it, the behaviour you want from them, and the deliverables that might help. It maps the route to a result; influence mapping maps the room instead.

The map has four levels, asked in this order: why, who, how, what. The goal sits in the middle. Everything hanging off it is a guess you are allowed to delete.

That permission is the whole value. A deliverable on the map is a candidate — not a commitment — so a team can stop building something the moment it stops serving the goal.

Key takeaways

• Four levels: why the goal, who the actors, how the impacts, what the deliverables.
• Deliverables are options to test, not a scope list to deliver in full.
• It answers what we should build; influence mapping answers whose agreement we need.
• One map carries one measurable goal, because two goals stop it arbitrating anything.

How it works

You build an impact map outward from a single measurable goal. Name the actors who can help or block it, state the behaviour change you want from each, then list the deliverables that might cause that change.

Read the map left to right and it argues a case: we build this, so that this actor does that, which moves the goal. Read it right to left and every feature has to earn its place.

Teams usually draw the map on a wall in a single session of about 90 minutes. Longer than that and the group starts designing solutions, which is the one thing the technique defers until the goal is agreed.

Each surviving deliverable then gets a cheap test rather than a full build. You ship the smallest thing that could change the behaviour, measure whether it did, and prune the branch if it did not.

In 2023 the Government Accountability Office published a guide distilling past audit findings into 13 key practices across four areas, the first of which is planning for results. An impact map is a small version of that discipline.

Before you commit to a deliverable, a change impact analysis tells you what else shifts when you ship it. The map decides what is worth doing; the analysis counts the cost of doing it.

Because every branch ends in an outcome rather than a feature, the map also sits well with outcome based pricing, where a supplier is paid for the impact instead of the backlog.

Examples

Impact maps earn their keep wherever a team has more ideas than evidence. Three settings show the pattern, across online retail, support operations and public health, and all three write the goal before anybody writes a feature.

Online retail. A European clothing retailer sets a goal of cutting checkout abandonment by a tenth before the Christmas quarter. Shoppers, payment providers and the fraud team each become actors, with a different behaviour wanted from each.

Support operations. A Philippine contact centre maps a goal of fewer repeat contacts. Agents, customers and the billing team are the actors, and a knowledge base rewrite and a billing fix become rival deliverables rather than a combined plan.

In agile outsourcing engagements that same map keeps client and provider arguing about one goal instead of two backlogs. Scope talks get shorter when both sides can see which branch a request hangs from.

Public health. Teams test the final branch with measurement, not opinion. The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention describes impact evaluation as a method that compares outcomes against what would have happened without the program.

Scaled delivery groups pin the map above the planning board so every agile release train can see which goal its increment is meant to serve.

Despite the shared first word, impact sourcing is a hiring model that recruits from under-served communities. It is not a mapping technique, and the two are easy to confuse in search results.

What makes all three settings work is the discipline of writing one goal. A map with two goals splits the argument — and a branch that loses against the first goal simply wins against the second, so nothing is ever dropped.

Impact maps also travel badly into fixed price contracts. Where scope is already locked in a statement of work, the map can still rank the work, but the permission to delete a deliverable has been signed away.

Related terms

• Change impact analysis: weighs what a chosen change disturbs, after the deliverable is picked.
• Outcome based pricing: pays a provider for the result the map defines, not for effort spent.
• Impact sourcing: a hiring model recruiting from under-served communities, unrelated to mapping.
• Impact investing: places capital for social return alongside a financial return.
• Business capability map: charts what the whole organisation can do, not what one goal needs.

FAQ

What are the four levels of an impact map?

Why, who, how and what. The goal comes first, then the actors, then the behaviour change wanted from each actor, then the deliverables that might produce it.

How is impact mapping different from influence mapping?

Impact mapping plots a goal and the work that might move it. Influence mapping plots people by how much say they hold and how much they care, so it answers a political question rather than a planning one.

Who should be in the room when you draw one?

Whoever can approve the goal and whoever will build against it. A map drawn by delivery alone gets overruled — one drawn by executives alone gets ignored.

How often should the map change?

Every time evidence arrives. Branches get pruned when a deliverable fails to move the behaviour it promised, and that pruning is the technique working rather than failing.

Does an impact map replace a roadmap?

No. A roadmap says when things ship, while the map says why they should ship at all.

Read the provider research and market guides at Outsource Accelerator when a branch of your map points to work better done outside.