impact-mappinglisted

# Impact Mapping A strategic-planning technique (Gojko Adzic, *Impact Mapping*) that prevents the single most common roadmap failure: **building deliverables that don't actually move the goal.** It does this by forcing every feature to trace back through an actor and a behaviour change to a measurable goal — and by making the assumptions in that chain explicit and testable. An impact map is a mind-map with exactly four levels, answering four questions. ## The four levels 1. **Goal — WHY?** The measurable business objective. Must be a metric with a target and a deadline, not an activity. SMART. Examples: "Reach 5,000 weekly active users by Q3", "Cut onboarding drop-off from 60% to 30%." - Bad goal (an activity): "Launch the mobile app." - Good goal (an outcome): "20% of signups complete first upload within 24h." 2. **Actors — WHO?** The people/systems who can produce the desired effect — or obstruct it. Be specific: not "users" but "first-time uploaders", "returning power users", "the support team", "the recommender system". Include actors who could get in the way, not just help. 3. **Impacts — HOW?** The **behaviour changes** we want from each actor — how their actions should change to move the goal. Phrase as a change in what the actor *does*: "uploads a second statement", "shares the app with a friend", "stops abandoning at the password screen." Impacts can also be reductions in harmful behaviour. *This is the level teams skip