Impact Mapping · Gojko Adzic · 2012
While impact mapping isn't a panacea, it can shift discussions with stakeholders away from requirements and towards outcomes - which is always a good thing.
- Impact maps are a strategic planning tool, they visually illustrate the WHY, WHO, HOW, and WHAT of a problem.
- They directly link solutions to user benefits, making assumptions explicit and providing context for decision making.
- Impact maps expose areas of uncertainty and facilitate a shift from directive, push-based methods to adaptive, pull-based approaches in software development.
- Impact maps aid in creating better-aligned plans and roadmaps, enhancing team collaboration.
- An impact map is a collaboratively drawn mind-map. It visualises scope and underlying assumptions by answering four questions: why, who, how, and what.
- Why are we doing this? The goal we’re trying to achieve.
- Who can produce the desired effect? Who can obstruct it? Who will be impacted? The actors that can influence the outcome. Who are the decision makers, user groups and customer segments. Be specific. 'User' is too broad.
- How should our actors' behaviour change? How can they help us achieve our goals? How can they obstruct or prevent us? The impacts we want to create. Focus on activities and behaviour, don’t confuse with features.
- What can we do as an organisation or a delivery team? Deliverables, features or organisational activities. Introduce scope only after the first three questions. Impact maps link requirements to value, making it easier to have conversations around value. Breakdown deliverables into independent chunks that provide clear business value. They can help you avoid over investing in less important actors or impacts. Throw out deliverables that don’t contribute to any important impact for your goal. Keep it high level, break them down into detail later.
Never aim to implement the whole map. Instead, find the shortest path through the map to the goal.
- Online Gaming Worked Example
- Why: increase number of players to 1 million
- Who: players
- How: inviting friends
- What: incentives (chips, or other recommendation)
- The three key roles of Impact maps are strategic planning, defining quality and roadmap management
- Strategic Planning: Collaborate with cross-functional leadership to understand the business scope at the outset. Get clear on the vision and the goals. Impact maps help groups discover quick wins, and alternative solutions that deliver the same outcomes faster.
- Defining Quality: A shared understanding of the outcome we’re trying to achieve, and the behaviours we’re trying to change helps us focus on impact not functionality. Clear metrics based on behaviour change are the key unlock.
- Roadmap Management: An impact map communicates scope, goals and priorities but also assumptions on two levels. Combine Impact Maps with frequent iterative releases to measure progress.
- Scope creep is reduced by mapping deliverables to goals and measuring progress. It’s easier to spot wrong solutions (or pet solutions) that won’t affect our goal.
- Many projects fail because the business goal is too vague. Set SMART goals (Specific, Measurable, Action-oriented, Realistic, and Timely). Making objectives measurable allows us to determine if we've established the right goals. It helps to align everyone's actions and define precise and deliverable outcomes.
- Assign metrics that help you understand whether or not you’re investing in the right area of the map.
- Impact maps focus us on behaviour change and how we can observe it.
- Advice from Tim Harford’s book ‘Adapt’:
- Variation: explore and implement new ideas
- Survivability: test new ideas at a survivable scale
- Selection: use feedback and learn from mistakes
- Continuously delivering items that are too small to make a difference from a business perspective causes a disconnect between business and delivery. Impact maps help us report progress at a more meaningful level
- You’ll have better prioritisation conversations if you engage business leaders on prioritising business problems (not scope and features).
- Avoid creating too many user stories too quickly. Impact maps help you prioritise and plan at a high level, use user stories once you’ve agreed a direction.
- Visualisation in a meeting is worth 80 points of IQ because it releases energy, intelligence and creativity in the room.
- Respond to questions about costs and times by asking: How valuable is this? How much do you want to invest? When do you want it?
Creating an impact Map:
- Preparation:
- Discover real goals: Express your vision as expected business goals. If objectives are unclear, use questions to reverse engineer the intent behind features.
- Define good measurements: Discussing how to measure success starts conversations about viability and priorities. Establish precise measurements by agreeing…
- Scale: what we’ll measure
- Meter: how we’ll measure it
- Benchmark: what the situation is like now
- Minimum acceptable value
- Constraint: for investment
- Target: the desired value
- Plan your first milestone: Scrutinise if everything needs to be a part of the current milestone. Use dot voting to narrow down to one objective.
- Mapping:
- Draw the map skeleton: Place the first milestone in the center of the map, connecting a few key deliverables to it. Populate with an initial set of actors, impacts, and deliverables. If you have a feature wishlist, reverse-engineer the key ones.
- What is the simplest way to support this activity? What else could we do?
- If we're unsure about the assumption, what is the simplest way to test it?
- Could we test it without software?
- Could we start earning with a partly manual process?
- Find alternatives: Define as many alternatives as you can, but limit the discussion to actors and behaviour impacts. Have small groups work independently, reviewing results every 20 minutes. Find a better or cheaper solution, or a shorter journey to the key objectives.
- Identify key priorities: Find the best path by assessing possible obstructions, looking for high-value low-hanging fruit, and thinking through key assumptions. Use dot voting if necessary. Focus on prioritising impacts, not deliverables and scope.
- Use the KANO or purpose-alignment models if needed.
- Earn or Learn: Now focus on possible deliverables, everything should directly contribute towards the centre of the map. Include experimental scope and validation BUT set a learning budget in time or cost.
Are we sure that the assumption behind our #1 item is correct? If the answer is ‘No’, find a way to test the assumption within your learning budget.
- Measure results as early as possible. Deliverables that fail to produce results point to invalid assumptions. Meanwhile, validated assumptions could justify further investment.
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We apply our de-anonymization methodology to the Netflix Prize dataset, which contains anonymous movie ratings of 500,000 subscribers of Netflix, the world's largest online movie rental service. We demonstrate that an adversary who knows only a little bit about an individual subscriber can easily identify this subscriber's record in the dataset.
Using the Internet Movie Database as the source of background knowledge, we successfully identified the Netflix records of known users, uncovering their apparent political preferences and other potentially sensitive information.
Anonymising data sounds so absolute - like it’s a simple act that once done keeps you safe. This paper taught me that isn’t the case, and more care and attention is required.
Anonymising data is complex and prone to failure if not done with care. Managing user data responsibly, ensuring privacy, and staying ahead of potential risks are key aspects of a product manager's role in today’s data-driven world.
- Product managers should advocate for advanced techniques (e.g. differential privacy or k-anonymity) when dealing with sensitive user data
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- Be aware of how data is collected, processed, and stored, particularly in large datasets, to mitigate risks of de-anonymisation.
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