Enrolling customers to participate in designing a solution: the visual and collaborative aspects of impact mapping help to engage both delivery teams and customers or business users in defining a good solution together.

Three key roles

Impact mapping is a strategic planning technique. It prevents organisations from getting lost while building products and delivering projects, by clearly communicating assumptions, helping teams align their activities with overall business objectives and make better roadmap decisions.

the umbrella of agile or lean delivery methods, and more recently lean startup ideas, will learn how to better focus deliverables and engage business sponsors and users.

This is the least important level of an impact map.

Impact mapping helps to create better plans and roadmaps that ensure alignment of business and delivery, and are easily adaptable to change.

Be specific. Avoid generic terms such as ‘users’ – different categories of users might have different needs, and not all users of a system might be important to consider for a particular project.

Pet features

Measurability is the key element here – if a goal is measurable, the other elements are easier to pin down.