Impact Mapping Workshop
In our post OKR Process: How to Adapt and Operationalize it, we defined a couple different approaches for moving toward an outcome based roadmap. Another similar method you can use is called Impact Mapping. Tim Herbig, Product Consultant and Coach, wrote this in-depth article about Impact Mapping to focus on outcomes in product management.
You can facilitate an Impact Mapping workshop after you’ve defined your OKRs to help plan your outcome based roadmap, or you can use this method any time you’re working on a new strategic initiative. You can continue to build on the map as you conduct discovery research, experiment, and learn. An impact map helps make ideas more concrete and narrow the focus for each outcome/behavioral change you’re trying to drive. This can help your team generate solution ideas and ways you can quickly test those ideas.
Facilitating an Impact Mapping Workshop
We took Tim Herbig’s Impact Mapping Miro template and added an additional step for our workshop. You can start by working through the map level-by-level. The top three levels (why, who, how) should be defined in your OKR definition workshop. The last two levels (what and whether) are where you will spend most of the time focusing in the Impact Mapping workshop.
5 levels to run an impact map session
Why—this top level can be your objective or overall strategic goal
Who—you can break this down into several sections on your impact map by focusing on whose behavior you’re trying to change (for example, this could be a specific customer segment. You might have one section for new customers and one for existing customers.)
How—these are the OUTCOMES—the behavior changes you’re trying to create (as defined by your OKRs.)
What—here’s where we focus in the Impact Mapping workshop. These are the solutions. It’s important to note that these ideas don't guarantee execution. Instead it’s about generating ideas that could possibly drive the outcomes you’re trying to achieve. These are assumptions that need to be tested.
Whether—this is the other area we focus on in the Impact Mapping workshop—what is the fastest way and least amount of work to experiment whether the solution is worth implementing?
When you get to the what level, you can ask ‘How might we get users to do more of these behaviors?’ For example, if one of the outcomes that you’re trying to drive is increasing online orders, you can ask ‘How might we increase orders placed online?” and everyone on the team can brainstorm ways they believe the team can achieve that behavior change. Give everyone a few minutes to brainstorm ideas then have everyone vote on their top three. Take the top voted solution ideas and move to the next step in the map—Whether.
In the Whether step, the team will brainstorm ways they can gather evidence through experiments to gain confidence in solutions that will help achieve your outcomes. Ask the team to brainstorm ways to experiment and test (what is the fastest way and least amount of work to learn and gain confidence in this solution or rule it out?) Think fast and scrappy—this could be anything from an A/B test, a landing page with an offer to test interest in your product/service, a concept/prototype test, painted door test—there are a number of methods you could use.
Once the team has brainstormed experiments, you can write a hypothesis for each experiment and define success criteria to validate or invalidate the hypothesis. The goal is to continuously learn, so we encourage you to build on this map and use it to narrow your focus on different customer segments. You could start with the most important segment you need to focus on and then work your way through the other segments. For example, if your team has determined that customer retention is your most promising strategic possibility, you might want to focus your efforts on existing customers. Or, if your team has decided to focus on acquiring new customers, you could focus on the new customer segment. Try the workshop with your team using our free Mural template!
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