Impact Mapping by Gojko Adzic

Recently (March 2016) while scanning my to-read list on Pocket I stumbled upon an article by Kevin Albert about Impact Mapping, a technique for making sure that what you’re working on actually makes sense in the big picture. Imagine my surprise when, while moving from one office to another, I found the book mentioned in this article on a desk. Two days later I had borrowed it 😉

Impact mapping is roadmap/project planning technique based around specifically structured mindmaps. The focus here is on what should be achieved (the big goal, or the big WHY), who contributes to achieving or preventing it (actors), what would the actor do to affect the goal (impact), and how can the product influence that impact with a deliverable. The author combines this with other tools like data-based decision making to facilitate goal-tracking.

In this book you learn what a good impact map should look like, how to get there (planning sessions, mapping sessions) and how to work with the result. The basic idea is that impact maps help finding small deliverables that can be worked on iteratively to achieve their big-picture goal.

Everything is presented in a very lighthearted but still extremely focused way. The method sounds extremely useful and practical, so I’m pretty sure I will eventually use it somewhere 😊