What is the Impact Mapping template?
Use a strategic planning technique to allow your organization or team to stay on track while building and developing new products. Represent graphically your goals, actors, and steps that you need to take to meet your goal. Communicate clearly what you want to achieve, ensure everyone is aligned on business objectives, and create better roadmaps.
Visualize the connection between the project and the rest of your organization. Capture key assumptions to deliver solutions without over-engineering or wasting time, funds, or energy. Focus on your:
- Goal — the heart of your impact map and the reason why you do the work.
- Actors — people (or groups) who influence the goal.
- Impacts — options for how you achieve (or fail) the goal.
- Deliverables — steps you need to take to deliver the what of work.
What are the benefits of the Impact Mapping template?
Thanks to the Impact Mapping template, you can:
- Conduct a brainstorming session to decide what should be included in your product and what shouldn’t.
- Prove to your customers that it is (or it is not) worth investing time, resources, and funds to develop a particular feature.
- Plan out the next release, sprint, or project planning with your entire team.
- Prevent team members from getting lost when building new products and delivering projects.
- Align team activities with business objectives and make more adequate roadmap decisions.
How to use the Impact Mapping template in a few steps?
- Open the template on a new board or add it to an already existing one.
- Define the main goal (the why of the work) on a sticky note at the top of the flowchart by answering why you’re working on a particular project and what you’re hoping to achieve.
- Identify the actors (the who of the work) in the next swimlane by adding as many lines and sticky notes as needed. Dedicate one sticky note per actor and ask questions such as who can help you achieve your goal, who exactly your customers (or users) are, who will be impacted by your project, or who can obstruct whom?
- Determine your actions’ impact (the how of the work) in the following swimlane. Write down options on sticky notes for achieving or failing the main goal. Answer questions such as how the actors can help you achieve your goal, how your actors’ behavior should change as a result of achieving this goal, or how the actors can prevent you from achieving the goal. Connect each potential impact with an appropriate actor using lines.
- Populate the last swimlane with sticky notes describing deliverables (the what of the work). Note down answers to questions such as what you can do to make sure you will achieve the goal or how you can support the desired impact. Connect deliverables with appropriate impacts using lines.
**The Impact Mapping technique has been originally created by Gojko Adzic. The article created by Mark Dalgarno has inspired us to create our own version of the Impact Mapping template and the copy on this page.
Use this template
