Impact Mapping: Making a Big Impact with Software Products and Projects

Great book! Quick read, good graphics. This book has helped me change the way I manage products and focus on User and Business outcomes. This is such a solid way to ensure your work returns results and stops scope creep in its tracks.

Being able to visualize the answer to the why, who, how and what a project aims to solve for is impactful (no pun intended) in its own right, never mind the simple methodology advised in practicing this. I think quite novel in the concept and implementation and one that I'm interested to test further in my working environment. Would have preferred some more detailed examples to aid understanding, but jumped across to supporting website where needed.Quote:- In essence, you should care about impact mapping because it can help you build products and deliver projects that make an impact, not just ship software.

Impact Mapping provides essential guidance on using an efficient and effective technique that encourages product partners to build the right products--ones that have impact. Impact mapping, the subject of Gojko's lithe, approachable book, is an adaption of visual mapping technique (effect mapping).Impact maps serve to align teams to business objectives, test mutual understanding of goals and expected outcomes, focus teams toward the highest value features to deliver, and enable collaborative decision-making. As such, impact maps--succinctly and approachably described in Gojko's book--is a key tool for collaborative strategic planning.This is a book you can reference with ease as you plan and facilitate workshops (collaborative meetings with clear purpose and outcomes) for example: release or iteration planning, product roadmapping, process improvement, product and team chartering. And don't forget: it's not just for software products. You will find impact mapping and Gojko's book, useful for strategic alignment needed for any product--software, systems, or services.Gojko's book is useful, useable and desirable--all the characteristics we want in a great resource! It is useful for building a shared understanding of the big "why's" for our work that is visual, fast to use, and encourages product partners to collaborate. It is useable--easy to read, including engaging cartoons and color, examples, references, and tips. It's desirable to build product that provide impact--aligns to goals and objectives and provide evidence of their value.Try impact mapping and use Gojko's marvelous book, Impact Mapping: Making a Big Impact with Software Products and Projects to guide you to do your best, most impactful work.

What I didn't like:1. The 1st quarter of the book contains too much about the benefits of impact mapping without providing much context. e.g: Impact mapping solves the problem of X in the lean startup methodology.It provides the "what" but doesn't provide much details on how and why it is better.2. The book could be structured much better in a way the reader can absorb and implement Gojko ideas without understanding the whole concept. e.g: showing the readers the end result of what they can do after reading the book instead of filling it up with how good impact mapping is.To be honest, readers don't care how great it is if it doesn't help them.3. Not enough image and validity on how other companies are using Impact Mapping / case studies.4. Too much tactic not enough strategy. The book doesn't provide enough fundamentals and reasoning on how impact mapping will benefit the readers.5. The term Gojko used like "deliverables", "actors" and "impact" can be much better phrased to be much understandable. Every single time when deliverables is used, my brain have too rephrase it too features.What I like:1. I love the structure of impact mapping on how we must think of the impact first instead of thinking of features to build.2. The book is short and can be read in 1 go.With a bit of restructuring and optimising so that the readers can implement this quickly in their business, I believe this book can be on par or even better than the Lean Startup by Eric Ries.

I just used this book to help drive some process ideation and alignment for a new IT Dept. initiative. The model described in this book has already helped with the planning of our approach and how to bridge what has been a long-standing gap. I am really looking forward putting the information/model to work. While the examples are easy and just enough to understand the concepts, I would have liked to see more graphic/visual examples to show how some of the mitigation activities work/affect the model. That being said, I think this is a great book overall and practical for immediate use, in conjunction with your existing knowledge/skillsets.

As an industry, we are getting better at how we build software -- building it right -- but we don't always know what to build in the first place -- building the right thing. Impact Mapping provides a great visualization tool for collectively reasoning about what this "right thing" is, and how to put it in the context of our goals and our assumptions (both now made explicit) about why we think building this certain thing will help us reach our goal. I love the technique and this book provides a clear description that allowed me to start using it in practice.It is a little light in content, which was intentional according to the author, but it covers all the bases without any redundant fluff, and it even makes space for some delightful illustrations.To me, Impact Mapping is the next logical step in the path of Agile software development methods, as it extends the concepts of lightweight iteration and feedback to the process of deciding what to build, not just how we build it.