Importance of Impact Mapping Technique In Building Complex Products

Impact Mapping is a strategic planning technique (often in a graphical way) that better helps Agile organizations build products and deliver projects by clearly defining assumptions, aligning activities with overall business goals, and helping make better roadmap decisions. Most importantly, it also prevents Product Owners from getting lost. While studying various job boards I found a probable case study:

Often B2B products do not focus on solving the pains and gains of end-user (B 2 B 2 C) who actually end up using that product/service. Below is a screenshot of a cloud-based B2B HR application where I was taken while applying for various companies.

A solution is designed in such a way that a candidate would require to navigate various screens to fill in the required details to apply for a job. The number of form fields to be filled in for 1 application are roughly 60-100+ for almost all companies with a repeat ratio of up to 90%. I tried to apply almost 50 different companies from which roughly 60% were using this application (totaling 30). That means I need to fill in 1800-3000 form fields repeatedly because the solution is "primarily designed as B2B" and as a candidate, I can not create & save my profile globally to re-use it for future applications across other desired companies (though I can create and re-use for the same company).

Here Impact Mapping technique can help the Product Owner to identify all Actors (Users) of this application till the end of the chain to solve pain/gains. Below is given an example of the Impact Mapping technique with the "Vision -> Actors -> Activities -> Constraints -> Features" model.

An Impact Mapping template to create the above map is shown as a cover image of this article. Using the above example and the provided template, solution of my case study would be like this:

In order to "reuse my saved application across other companies"

As an "applicant"

I want "to create and save my profile globally"

Because "right now I have to repeatedly fill in the same details"

So that "I can re-use global profile across other companies"

Another popular mapping is organizing "Vision/Goal -> Actor -> Impact -> Deliverable". You can also build your own model as per your product needs.

An experienced Agile Coach / Scrum Master can help organizations uncover such blind spots to build better products.

https://www.impactmapping.org/intro-resources.html

https://resources.scrumalliance.org/Webinar/impact-mapping-at-scale

https://www.scrum.org/resources/blog/extending-impact-mapping-gain-better-product-insights

#agile #scrum #impactmap #scrummaster #productdiscovery