Let’s start with a very specific goal.
My goal as the author of this blog post is to make 20% more people read this post until the end compared to other blog articles.
- Goal: 20% more readers who read the post until the end.
- Actor: You – a person considering working with Sailing Byte.
- Impact: make you feel significantly greater clarity after reading on how to plan and evaluate a project based on business goals, and ensure you become familiar with the arguments explaining why this method works
- Tasks to be done by me:
- This article should be written “in a human way”, without jargon.
- It should be short and concise
- It should explain the purpose of creating Impact Maps in a Software House
What I have just done is exactly an impact map.
I started with a business goal and how your behavior / awareness must change (Impact) for this goal to have a chance to happen.
What exactly is Impact Mapping?
Gojko Adzic – the author of the book “Impact Mapping” – calls it a “strategic sketch” that keeps organizations focused on outcomes, not just software delivery.
I had the opportunity to learn this method directly from Gojko during his workshops, and later I conducted dozens of Impact Mapping sessions with different teams and clients.
This combination of theory and practice showed me that in many projects this is the missing piece of the puzzle – people are great at defining “what”, but rarely clearly define “why” and “for whom”.
What does an Impact Map look like for your project?
Imagine you are planning a new product or developing an existing system in the logistics industry.
Instead of starting with a list of “required features”, we sit down together at a board and draw:
- Goal: Increase the percentage of on-time deliveries from 88% to 96% within 9 months.
- Actors: fleet drivers, route dispatchers, B2B clients.
- Impact: drivers are late less often, dispatchers react faster to delays, clients file fewer complaints.
- Tasks: mobile app for drivers, route planning panel for dispatchers, delivery status notification module, KPI dashboard.
Why is Impact Mapping especially important when working with a Software House?
If you’ve worked with software houses before, you probably know this risk: a long list of features, “completed” sprints, paid invoices – and the business outcome is, at best, outside the scope of the conversation.
Impact Mapping is the answer exactly to this problem: it shifts the conversation from “how many hours will it take?” to “does it even make sense for our goal?”.
In the logistics example, we will be interested in whether the percentage of on-time deliveries increased from 88% to 96% within 9 months.
Research and practice from teams using Impact Mapping show several recurring benefits:
- Better alignment of features with business goals – teams stop delivering “nice but unnecessary” features.
- Faster time to first results – thanks to focusing on impact and iterative work in small steps.
- Less waste – ideas that do not support the goal are consciously postponed instead of “just in case” being added to the backlog.
This is not a magic wand, but a very concrete conversation structure that works well with agile, lean and design thinking approaches.
In the context of working with Sailing Byte, this means that:
- Before any “let’s build feature X” appears, we jointly define the goal and actors.
- The impact map becomes a living document that we return to during the project, measuring real outcomes, not just completed tickets.
- Each prioritization decision has its justification on the map, which makes alignment easier on your side (e.g. with the board or investors).
How you can take the first step
If you are still reading this, my own impact map is starting to work – it managed to keep your attention longer than usual.
Now you can go one step further and use Impact Mapping for your own project.
I suggest a very simple step.
Write one sentence with the goal you set for your product (existing or just being designed)
For inspiration, here are sample goals for industries:
Logistics:
- Reduce the number of empty truck runs by 25% within 12 months.
- Shorten the average loading/unloading time in the warehouse by 30% within half a year.
- Reduce the number of incorrect deliveries (wrong location / quantity) by 40% within 6 months
Real Estate:
- Shorten the average time to rent an empty property from 90 to 60 days.
- Increase the number of inquiries from qualified leads by 30% within a year thanks to a better website and CRM.
- Reduce the number of delayed rent payments by 40% within 9 months thanks to automatic reminders and e-payments.
Send them to us, and we will get back to you on how we can achieve this goal.
