Impact Mapping is an engaging, graphical, strategic planning technique introduced by Gojko Adzic in 2012. It helps cross-functional teams align on goals and outcomes by focusing on behavioral changes necessary for success. At the end of an impact mapping session, you should have:

• A shared understanding of your effort’s goal or problem statement
• An inventory of human behavioral changes required (or avoided) to achieve success—these are the “impacts” the technique is named for.
• Optionally, an inventory of project scope items needed to achieve the impacts.
• A prioritization of scope and/or impacts.
• A physical or digital diagram capturing the above.

In customer-centric roles like Customer Success, Sales, and Product, teams often focus on delivering a “shopping list of features.” Yet even when those features are delivered, the intended business outcome may not be achieved. Impact Mapping reorients teams around delivering measurable value, making it particularly valuable for aligning cross-functional teams around customer outcomes.

Key benefits include:

• Customer-Centric Conversations: Impact Mapping introduces a lightweight design thinking approach, enabling teams to focus on outcomes rather than outputs. This is essential for aligning Sales, Onboarding, Product, and Customer Success teams around shared goals for customer success.

• Improved Collaboration: The visual, graphical mind map format reduces barriers to participation and makes it easier to facilitate meaningful discussions.

• Versatility: Impact Mapping works for executive-level strategic planning or shorter, more tactical sessions. For example, it can be used to define onboarding goals that align with Sales commitments and Product capabilities.

• Outcome Orientation: By emphasizing impacts for key actors (e.g., customers or internal teams), the technique naturally drives outcomes-driven conversations.

• Leadership Alignment: It fosters leadership by intent (ref David Marquet and ensures alignment at both strategic and tactical levels.

Who do you need?

• Facilitator: Ideally a neutral party with experience in impact mapping.
• Product Owner: Brings insights into product capabilities and constraints.
• Project Sponsor: Includes both technical and business perspectives.
• Architects: Provide guidance on feasibility and constraints.

How Impact Mapping Aligns Teams for Outcomes-Driven Customer Conversations

Impact Mapping is particularly effective for aligning Sales, Onboarding, Product, and Customer Success teams by fostering discussions around what behavioral changes are needed to achieve success.

Examples:

• Sales: Use Impact Mapping to identify the promises made to customers during the sales process and ensure they align with the delivery teams’ understanding.
• Onboarding: Map out the behavioral changes customers need to adopt your product successfully, creating clarity around onboarding priorities.
• Product: Collaborate with Product teams to ensure the features being built are tied to measurable impacts on customer outcomes.
• Customer Success: Drive conversations about long-term success metrics and connect them to onboarding and product roadmaps.

Suggested Time

For the shortened variation:

• 2-4 hours prep: Define the goal or problem statement ahead of the session to avoid losing focus.
• Optional 2 hours: Create a draft impact map for initial discussions.
• 4-hour session: Facilitate the workshop in 60-90 minute segments, either in one day or spread across multiple days.
• Session can be done on different days
• For the executive level session format, see the Impact Mapping book in the links section below.

Difficulty

• Facilitator: Moderate
• Participants: Easy

Facilitation Materials Needed

Digital Variation:

• a tool capability of building mind map like visualisations, for example Miro, Mural or Coggle (check the links section below).

Physical Variation:

• a large whiteboard
• whiteboard markers
• sticky notes
• markers for stickies

How does it fit?

• Typically done in the Why area of the Discovery of the Open Practice Library

Related Practices

• Start At The End is another practice which leads to the same outputs. Compared to Start At The End, Impact Mapping produces a higher fidelity understanding of the domain, but at the cost of increased complexity for facilitation. Generally speaking, Impact Mapping is the better fit when building products or services, and Start At The End is a better fit when discussing organizational change or other generally nebulous efforts.