How to create an impact map in 7 easy steps

Impact mapping is a collaborative product/project planning technique. It lets you set business goals and visualize the way and means to achieve them.

Originally used by software development teams, this method shows you the impact a feature will make (or won’t) once implemented. By creating an impact map, you can align business objectives with customer needs, allocate and prioritize tasks to achieve them.  

Impact mapping also comes in handy when you’re planning not only products but projects as well. Want to facilitate the existing development process? Wonder how to improve the product experience for users? Coming up with a customer retention tactic? Try out this method!

Impact maps are typically hierarchical tree diagrams with different levels that help you see the bigger picture. Usually, they include the following levels:

• business goals to reach; 
• user or customer personas who can influence the outcome;
• impacts to create;
• deliverables to be provided;
• user stories to translate deliverables into features for implementation.

In case you need a little more explanation on basics before diving deeper, check the dedicated post about impact mapping.

When should you create an impact map?

There are many applications of this technique. For example, adopt it when you want to check your business strategy and get your team on the same page. Anytime you have doubts about upcoming transformations, new initiatives and features, just map it out!

Besides, you can use it when you:

• don’t know what should be in the product;
• want to prove that a particular feature isn’t worth enough to your client or stakeholders;
• plan the next sprint or release.

For more details, read 6 Cases When You Need to Create an Impact Map.

How impact mapping is different from similar techniques?

Unlike alternatives, impact maps are pretty illustrative because they enable you to visualize how your assumptions connect to user needs and business goals. Besides, creating impact maps is easier. The following 7 steps will let you transform abstract ideas into complete user stories:

1. Set and describe business goals.
2. Define personas or actors – people who can help you achieve your goals.
3. Define actions aka impacts that you want these actors to take.
4. Come up with deliverables aka what you can do to inspire these actions.
5. Break deliverables into user stories.
6. Give an estimate to these stories.
7. Go on air with your map by importing it to your project management tool.

Simple enough? Let’s put theory into practice by creating an impact map example for an imaginary company looking to retain employees. We'll be using our Impact Map tool to do it. 

Step 1. Define the goal

Imagine you are the Head of HR department at a retail company that faces The Great Resignation as an unexpected consequence of the COVID-19 pandemic. Your primary business goal might be retaining your A-players and newcomers. To translate it into numbers, you want to improve employee retention by 25% in the next quarter.

Pro tip: When setting up your goals, use the SMART framework. It will help you avoid vague terms and suggestions, and well-defined business goals are essential to proceed with impact mapping.

When ready, write everything down in the business goals section. It’s also a good idea to add some details to your goal. You may want to define:

• What exactly you want to achieve.
• Why achieving the goal is important.
• How you will know that you’ve achieved the goal.

Step 2. Identify personas or actors

You may find that in different sources that these influencers sometimes are called personas or actors. We’ll call them personas for the sake of consistency.

Note: Personas are not only the ones who help you, like customers or employees. They can be ones who prevent you from achieving your goals like competitors, government, etc.

Don’t focus on small details such as pretty pictures and names. Primarily, you need to know more about each persona. For example, you can answer such questions like:

• What do you know about the persona?
• What does the persona need?
• Does the persona have any frustrations? What are they?
• Is there anything you can do to solve the persona’s problems?

Answering these questions will help you find the right deliverables for each persona later. It might feel redundant, but having those questions answered will give you more insights for the next steps of mapping.

As an example, we will add two personas: Michael, a job seeker, and Terry, a senior HR manager.

Here they are on our impact map:

Step 3. Add impacts

Once you’re done with personas, it’s time to define actions you want these personas to take in order to help you achieve your goals. You can start with the one whose input is more valuable. Also, it is reasonable to put first those who are most interested in contributing. 

Describe precisely how you want the personas to change their behavior. These actions are the impacts we want to create in our impact map example.

For Michael, this would be something like staying longer with our company. As for Terry, we’d like to see that he reduces employee turnover.

Surely, each persona may have multiple impacts. We stick with this one-impact-per-person strategy for the sake of keeping the article somewhat short.

Step 4. Define deliverables

The next step is to decide what we can do for our actors so that they take action. In the software development context, for instance, these are the features of your product or service.

Again, for Michael, we want to improve our onboarding process. So we can come up with a detailed employee development plan for each newcomer at our company.

Terry doesn’t want to deal with dissatisfied employees who are on the verge of resignation. Otherwise, his big goal won’t be achieved. What can we do to help him? How about revamping our current onboarding process and creating individual career plans for each specialist at the company? This could solve his problem. 

Step 5. Break deliverables into user stories

Then, it’s about time to take what we’ve created and transform it into user stories. You can use a standard template to articulate them:

PERSONA -> OUTCOME -> ACTION

So we end up with these two user stories:

• Michael. As an employee, I want to know my career development plan so that I can understand my chances to get a promotion.

• Terry. As an HR manager, I want to know why employees leave so that I can understand how to encourage them to stay.

Step 6. Estimate user stories’ effort or value

Having outlined user stories, you can estimate them in terms of efforts needed to implement vs. expected value to agree on what to implement first. Usually, estimating is a team sport because individual specialists always can point out what dragons may be lurking beneath the surface based on their experience.

You can use different methods to rate user stories. Dot voting is probably one of the easiest ways, for example. However, impact/effort estimation gets you more understanding of what value stories bring (VALUE) and how many efforts you need to take to implement them (ESTIMATE). 

In UXPressia, you can switch your impact map to the Backlog view and estimate user stories according to their value and implementation complexity. 

Step 7. Pack your regular backlog with new user stories

When your impact map is finished, you can put your scored stories into action.

Export the map as a CSV file to import it to a project management tool you work with, for example, Jira or Trello.

Congrats!

We came up with two excellent ideas to prevent employee turnover at the company! Starting with the goal all the way to concrete features and ideas to be implemented.

It was our impact map in action. And now when you’re equipped with this knowledge, it’s time for you to build your own impact map!

Just make sure to do it with UXPressia — the ultimate toolset for designing top-notch services and your best source of inspiration.

Try the UXPressia Impact Map online tool for free.

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And be sure to download a PDF version of our impact mapping guide 😉

This is an updated version of the article published back in 2017.