Driving Focus and Clarity with Impact Mapping
How impact mapping solves common challenges for Producers managing stakeholder alignment on live-service games.
Impact mapping is a strategic tool that connects business goals to deliverables, ensuring alignment and clarity in project planning.
It links every task to measurable outcomes by preventing common issues like scope creep, misalignment, and poor prioritisation.
Impact mapping enhances live service game management and Agile practices by fostering collaboration, adaptability, and a focus on value.
Running a live service game presents many challenges, many of which stem from poor alignment between business goals and delivery and communication gaps. For a Producer, it is crucial to have a clear understanding of the why, who, how, and what behind the game they are working on. This clarity ensures that every decision and action contributes to the overall vision and goals of the title.
While other team members, such as designers, leads, or stakeholders, may share the responsibility of maintaining alignment, the ultimate accountability for ensuring a shared understanding across the team rests squarely on the Producer’s shoulders. They serve as the connective tissue, bridging the gaps between creative ambition, technical feasibility, and business goals.
By fostering this alignment, the Producer helps avoid miscommunication, ensures priorities stay focused, and empowers the team to deliver a game that meets player expectations and business objectives. It’s not just about managing tasks—it’s about orchestrating understanding and cohesion.
Impact mapping is a strategic tool that directly addresses these issues by connecting business objectives to specific deliverables.
What is Impact Mapping?
Impact Mapping was introduced by Gojko Adzic in his 2012 book “Impact Mapping: Making a Big Impact with Software Products and Projects.” It was designed to help teams focus on delivering outcomes rather than just outputs, aligning their efforts with strategic goals. Inspired by mind-mapping techniques, it leverages visual thinking to foster collaboration and clarity in planning.
The method emerged when Agile methodologies gained traction, and organisations needed ways to better connect their work with business objectives. It quickly became popular in product management and software development, particularly in environments that balance flexibility and focus.
How does Impact Mapping Work?
Impact Mapping is a goal-oriented planning technique that connects project deliverables to broader business goals by identifying desired impacts and the actions required to achieve them. It answers four key questions:
Why? - What is the goal we aim to achieve?
Who? - Which stakeholders can influence the goal?
How? - How can these stakeholders create the desired impact?
What? - What deliverables will enable these actions?
The output is a visual map that starts with the goal and branches into actors, impacts, and deliverables.
Goal
The primary objective the organisation or team aims to achieve.
This is the anchor of the impact map, ensuring all efforts are aligned with a specific and measurable outcome.
Actors
The people, groups, or systems that can influence or are affected by achieving the goal.
Examples include customers, users, team members, external stakeholders or infrastructure services.
Impacts
The changes in behaviour or outcomes needed from the actors to achieve the goal.
These describe how actors must act differently, such as increased user engagement or a shift in purchasing habits.
Deliverables
The specific tasks, features, or outputs the team creates to enable the desired impacts.
These represent the actionable steps or items required to achieve the behavioural changes identified.
The visual map organises these elements in a hierarchical structure, starting with the goal and branching out to show the connections between actors, impacts, and deliverables. This clarity helps teams focus on delivering value, avoid unnecessary work, and make informed prioritisation decisions.
In the example above, we illustrate that hierarchy:
Goal → Actor → Impact → Deliverable → Execution
Goal: Increase the retention rate of returning players by 20% within three months.
Actor: Returning Players.
Impact: Increase Session Frequency.
Deliverable: Add short, time-limited tasks to create urgency.
Execution: Create a user story to define a task system, write Gherkin scenarios for time-sensitive tasks, and group it under an epic for engagement-focused features.
Impact Mapping is widely used in product development, strategy workshops, and Agile practices to align cross-functional teams and keep projects outcome-driven.
We would typically try to answer those same questions with a scope statement, but that process is not for the faint of heart, and it can be challenging to get buy-in from stakeholders.
This tool’s DNA is rooted in the agile movement and other tools such as Flow Metrics, Vertical Slicing, and User Story Maps.
The Three Key Roles of Impact Mapping
Impact mapping is a versatile tool that bridges strategy, execution, and evaluation. It provides a structured way to align teams, define success, and adapt plans dynamically. By focusing on business goals and their connection to deliverables, impact mapping helps organisations prioritise work, measure outcomes, and collaborate effectively. Below are the three primary roles impact mapping plays in project and product management:
Strategic Planning: Impact mapping brings senior business and technical experts together at the start of a project to align on the scope from a business perspective. Its structure facilitates productive discussions and harnesses the collective wisdom of the group. This often uncovers quick wins or alternative solutions that are faster and cheaper to deliver while still achieving the desired outcomes. Effective strategic planning with impact mapping requires clear strategic goals and active involvement from senior decision-makers and technical leaders. It’s worth noting that impact mapping is less relevant for maintenance-mode projects.
Defining Quality: Impact mapping visualises the link between technical deliverables and their expected business outcomes. This clarity ensures that everyone involved in the project shares a unified understanding of quality at a holistic level. Testing shifts focus from checking features against technical specifications to validating that deliverables drive the desired behaviour changes in actors. To define quality through impact mapping, teams must agree that deliverables aim to change actor behaviour and establish measurable metrics reflecting stakeholder expectations for these changes.
Roadmap Management: Impact maps effectively communicate scope, goals, priorities, and assumptions, making them invaluable for managing roadmaps. By tracking actual behaviour changes and measuring their impact on objectives, teams can decide whether to continue with a particular part of the map or pivot to another focus area. Roadmap management with impact mapping requires alignment on achieving business goals over-delivering pre-set scope, frequent iterative releases to track progress, and agreed-upon metrics for the central goal.
10 Key Challenges and How Impact Mapping Helps
Below are some common problems producers face and how impact mapping provides effective solutions:
1. Scope Creep
Problem: Teams often add features that are not part of the original plan, leading to delays and bloated projects.
Solution: Impact mapping links each deliverable to the overarching business goal. It helps Producers define when an objective is achieved, allowing them to halt work on non-essential items. By focusing on value-driven outcomes, unnecessary additions can be avoided.
2. Over-Engineered Solutions
Problem: Teams sometimes create overly complex solutions when simpler alternatives would suffice.
Solution: Impact mapping identifies where excessive complexity exists and encourages simpler, faster approaches that achieve the same impact. Grouping deliverables by their contributions to specific goals makes over-engineering easier to spot and address.
3. Misalignment of Efforts
Problem: Teams may waste resources building features that don’t align with business objectives.
Solution: By prioritising the "why" behind each deliverable, impact mapping ensures everyone—from developers to stakeholders—clearly understands the business goals and assumptions. This alignment minimises wasted effort.
4. Poor Communication Between Teams
Problem: Miscommunication between business leaders and delivery teams can lead to missed goals or duplicated efforts.
Solution: Impact maps' visual nature creates a shared understanding of objectives and assumptions, bridging gaps between technical and non-technical teams. This fosters better collaboration and reduces misunderstandings.
5. Difficulty Prioritising Features
Problem: With many competing priorities, deciding which features to build first can feel overwhelming.
Solution: Impact maps frame features in the context of their effect on user behaviour and business goals. This clarity helps Producers prioritise based on impact, ensuring the most valuable work is tackled first.
6. Inability to Adapt to Change
Problem: Rapidly changing market conditions or player needs can render plans obsolete.
Solution: Impact maps are dynamic, showing how delivery plans relate to the external environment. This makes it easier to adjust assumptions and plans in response to new information, ensuring teams stay flexible.
7. Features That Don’t Contribute to Goals
Problem: Teams sometimes spend time on "pet features" that don’t align with business objectives.
Solution: Impact maps visually highlight features that lack a clear connection to desired outcomes. This makes it straightforward to eliminate or deprioritise low-value items.
8. Unvalidated Assumptions
Problem: Teams often make decisions based on untested assumptions.
Solution: Impact maps explicitly document assumptions, enabling Producers to track and validate them over time. This reduces risks associated with relying on incorrect assumptions.
9. Lack of Focus on Business Goals
Problem: Teams can lose sight of the primary business objective, focusing too much on technical delivery.
Solution: Impact mapping places the business goal at the centre, ensuring every task is aligned with the desired outcome. This approach helps deliver measurable impact, not just features.
10. Difficulty Setting Measurable Objectives
Problem: Vague goals make it hard to assess success or failure.
Solution: Impact maps support creating SMART (specific, measurable, actionable, realistic, and timely) objectives. They ensure that business goals and the impacts they aim to achieve are clearly defined and trackable.
Why Use Impact Mapping?
Impact mapping transforms the management of live service games by aligning deliverables with tangible business goals. It provides a clear framework for decision-making, reduces inefficiencies, and fosters a culture of focus and collaboration. For Producers, it’s a proven method for driving results while maintaining agility in an ever-changing industry.
Impact mapping aligns well with methods emphasising flow, transparency, and value delivery. By its nature, it complements tools and techniques that visualise work, understand dependencies, and improve efficiency.
Here’s how it fits in:
Strategic Alignment: Impact mapping clearly explains the "why" behind the work, ensuring the entire process focuses on delivering value. This clarity helps teams prioritise tasks and align efforts with overarching goals.
Visual Representation: Like other tools, impact mapping allows teams to visualise relationships between goals, actions, and outcomes. This shared understanding reduces confusion and helps them stay on the same page.
Improving Flow: By identifying which tasks directly contribute to the desired outcomes, it becomes easier to reduce waste, avoid bottlenecks, and keep work moving smoothly. Teams can assess whether their current workflows support the right activities.
Measuring Progress: Combining the strategic insight from impact mapping with data-driven techniques allows teams to measure whether their actions achieve the intended impact. This reinforces decisions and highlights areas needing adjustment.
Continuous Feedback and Improvement: Impact mapping encourages teams to revisit assumptions and outcomes regularly. This approach perfectly complements iterative approaches, ensuring processes remain responsive to new information and shifting priorities.
Criticisms and Limitations of Impact Mapping
While impact mapping is a powerful tool, it has its critics and limitations. One common challenge is the need for clear, measurable goals from the outset. If the goal is vague or poorly defined, the entire map can lose focus, leading to wasted effort or misaligned priorities. Similarly, the process heavily relies on the participation of the right people—senior stakeholders, technical experts, and cross-functional team members. Without their input, the map can miss critical perspectives, weakening its value.
Another limitation is the assumption that impacts and deliverables can always be identified with clarity. In complex or uncertain projects, predicting behavioural changes or linking deliverables to specific outcomes can be difficult. Additionally, creating and maintaining an impact map requires time and effort, which can feel burdensome, especially for teams already operating under tight deadlines.
Impact mapping works best in environments that emphasise iterative development and frequent releases. The flexibility required to revisit and adapt the map may not exist in more rigid or traditional settings. Finally, as with any tool, its success depends on how it’s used. If treated as a one-off exercise rather than a living document, it risks becoming irrelevant as the project evolves.
These limitations highlight the need for thoughtful implementation, ongoing collaboration, and an adaptable mindset to maximise impact mapping’s potential.
Implementing an Impact Map
Implementing an impact map effectively goes beyond just following the basic steps—it requires applying practical best practices to maximise its value. Start by ensuring the goal is specific, measurable, and tied to tangible business outcomes, avoiding vague or overly broad objectives. Bringing the right people into the process is critical. A cross-functional team, including decision-makers and technical experts, ensures diverse perspectives and creates alignment from the outset.
The map should focus on the "why," building clarity around the project's purpose. Prioritising actors and identifying their behavioural impacts helps narrow the focus to areas where the most value can be delivered. Assumptions should be made explicit, tested, and validated early to reduce risks and avoid wasted effort. When brainstorming deliverables, prioritise those that achieve impacts efficiently, focusing on value over volume.
An impact map is most effective when treated as a dynamic, living document. It should be regularly revisited and refined based on new insights or data, ensuring it remains aligned with the broader strategy. Finally, the map should be used as a collaboration and communication tool, helping to maintain a shared understanding among the team and stakeholders. When these best practices are integrated with the basic process, the impact map becomes a powerful tool for driving alignment, focus, and measurable outcomes.
Closing Thoughts
Impact mapping provides a higher-level perspective that complements detailed operational tools. It ensures that all tactical efforts contribute to meaningful business outcomes while maintaining flexibility and focus.
While some may argue that Agile is "dead," the principles behind impact mapping—focusing on outcomes, maintaining flexibility, and aligning with business objectives—remain highly relevant in modern software development. As the industry evolves, tools like impact mapping that promote strategic thinking and value delivery will likely stay valuable, regardless of the methodologies in vogue.