Impact Mapping Template
Set business goals and outline how to achieve them.
Trusted by 65M+ users and leading companies
About the Impact Mapping template
What is Impact Mapping?
Impact mapping is a strategic planning technique. It allows organizations to stay on track while building products and shipping goods and services. An impact map is a graphical representation of your goals and the steps you must take to deliver on them. By creating an impact map, you can clearly communicate with your teammates, align on business objectives, and build better roadmaps.
When building products or working on projects, it can be easy to lose sight of your role within the broader organization. But your projects have a dynamic relationship with everything else in the organization, including other projects, teams, products, and functions. Many planning techniques lack this big-picture view. Impact maps, by contrast, help you visualize the relationship between your project roadmaps and the rest of your organization. You can therefore capture key assumptions and scope so you can deliver solutions without waste or over-engineering.
When should you use Impact Mapping?
You can use Impact Mapping to help you decide what should be in a product, prove to a client that it’s not worth investing in a particular feature and plan your next sprint or release. You can also use Impact Mapping for any type of project planning.
What are the key steps of Impact Mapping?
Impact Mapping is generally broken into 4 key steps: setting and describing business goals, identifying the personas, defining the actions these personas will take, and brainstorming the deliverables that will prompt these actions to take place.
How do you create an Impact Map?
Creating an impact map is simple and easy to do if you follow these steps. You can use our Impact Mapping Template and discuss everything with your team in real-time using Miro’s virtual collaboration platform.
Step 1: Decide on your goals
Start by drawing a box that contains your goal. Why are we doing this project? What do we hope to achieve?
Step 2: Identify the actors
Draw a branch that links your goal to your next box: the actors. Who can produce the effect we’re looking for? Who can obstruct who? Who are our customers or users? Who will be impacted by our goal? Many people choose to have a box for each actor. Connect each box to your goal.
Step 3: Determine the impacts or actions
The second branch brings the impact of your goal into sharper focus. How should our actors’ behavior change as a result of this goal? How can they help us achieve our goal? How might they prevent us from achieving our goal? Draw a box for each potential impact and connect them to your actors.
Step 4: Define the deliverables
Once you have answered those questions, you can start thinking about the scope of your project. The third branch of the map deals with deliverables. What can we do to increase the likelihood that this goal will be achieved? How do we support the desired impact? These are your deliverables -- what you can hope to achieve within the scope of this project.
Get started with this template right now.
Mental Model Template
Works best for:
Business Management, Mind Mapping, Diagrams
Smart solutions and strong, strategic decisions. The best organizations make both, and a mental model is designed to help them do it. We give you a fast and easy way to try it out — just fill out our ready-made, flexible template and add sticky notes, shapes, and arrows to create a powerful map.
Epic & Feature Roadmap Planning
Epic & Feature Roadmap Planning template facilitates the breakdown of large-scale initiatives into manageable features and tasks. It helps teams prioritize development efforts based on business impact and strategic objectives. By visualizing the relationship between epics and features, teams can effectively plan releases and ensure alignment with overall project goals and timelines.
Family Tree Template
Works best for:
Education, Mapping
Family trees help you make sense of complicated family relationships, even generations back. With this Family Tree Template, you can quickly and easily add your siblings, parents, and extended family members. Plus, add extra information, notes, and even images to create a vibrant family tree.
Research Topic Brainstorm Template
Works best for:
Desk Research, Brainstorming, Ideation
Coming up with a topic for a research project can be a daunting task. Use the Research Topic Brainstorm template to take a general idea and transform it into something concrete. With the Research Topic Brainstorm template, you can compile a list of general ideas that interest you and then break them into component parts. You can then turn those parts into questions that might be the focus for a research project.
Cisco Recommended Security Architecture Template
Works best for:
Software Development, Diagrams
Cisco offers data center and access networking solutions built for scale with industry-leading automation, programmability, and real-time visibility. The Cisco Recommended Security Architecture uses Cisco elements to visually show the network design of Cisco networks.
3x3 Prioritization Method Template
Works best for:
Operations, Prioritization, Strategic Planning
It’s all about assessing a task or idea, and quickly deciding the effort it will take and the potential impact it will have—ranked low, medium, or high. That’s what the 3x3 prioritization method does: Help teams prioritize and identify quick wins, big projects, filler tasks, or time-wasters. With nine bucket areas, it offers slightly greater detail than the 2x2 Prioritization Matrix (or Lean Prioritization Method). It’s easy to make your own 3x3 prioritization matrix—then use it to determine what activities or ideas to focus on with your valuable resources.