From Goals To Action (Part 2 of 4): Impact Mapping

Discover and address impactful system actor behaviors systematically with Impact Mapping

In the first part of this series, we explored the concept of KPI Trees and how they can help us break down overarching goals into specific, manageable metrics that are ultimately driven by human behaviors. In the second part of this series, we’ll delve into another powerful tool that complements the KPI Tree in our toolkit for outcome-led management, in Product and beyond: Impact Mapping.

💡 You’ll Learn

• how Impact Mapping serves as a tool to systematically discover and address impactful system actor behaviors in alignment with overarching goals.
• how to apply Impact Mapping in real-world scenarios, using a step-by-step approach to identify actors, outcomes, and outputs.
• how Impact Maps as artifacts can foster cross-functional collaboration, ideation, and continuous experimentation and learning.
• and, most importantly, how to quickly get from goals to impactful action.

Meet Ricci. Ricci is the Product Manager in the cross-functional product team of a still pretty new department at a renowned university. The institution, though proud of its heritage, like many others saw itself confronted with evolving student demands for more flexible, digital learning experiences that got further amplified during the COVID-19 pandemic. Recognizing the need for change, the university formed Ricci’s team.

Their mission: Develop the university’s first fully remote and modular Master’s degree delivered through an all-digital learning experience. In the last two-and-a-half years, the team has been building a web app on top of the open-source Learning Management System (LMS) that the university had adopted during the pandemic to accommodate remote learning. Since the Master’s program had been launched over a year ago, two cohorts have started their studies on the new learning application.

Now that most of the work has been completed to enable smooth and engaging delivery of the program and the app seems to perform well in delivering the program, the university’s leadership asks Ricci and their team to focus on a new challenge: While the marketing team was quick in setting up an effective lead acquisition funnel based on their experience with the regular on-site programs, the actual conversion of leads to students turned out to be more difficult. With the third cohort of their remote Master’s program upcoming, the university still struggles with filling the available seats despite the massive spending per student acquired.

Considering the reasonable cost per lead (CPL), the lead conversion rate obviously was the main factor driving the customer acquisition costs (CAC). Ricci and their team were tasked to identify possible interventions to improve conversion and bring the CAC down. On a Monday morning, the team meets to get to work.

Tasked with improving the conversion rate for their university’s remote Master’s program, Ricci and their team decide to schedule an Impact Mapping session with a few colleagues from sales, admissions, and student success. But before we follow them along, let’s quickly familiarize ourselves with Impact Mapping.

Mapping The Path To Impact

Evolution hard-wired us to jump to solutions quickly when we face a challenge. While learnings from previous experiences and biases are meant to help us overcome and survive in critical situations in the wild, the same mechanics have proven less helpful when it comes to those more complex and systemic problems of the modern world.

This is where methods like Impact Mapping come in: By providing a clear structure to guide our thinking along, it forces us out of the aforementioned way of “fast thinking” into the more deliberate and analytical “slow thinking” (also known as system 2 thinking). The Impact Map as the artifact being created in the process additionally serves as a basis for getting everyone out of their head and having a well-structured and collaborative conversation on a common challenge. Impact Mapping had originally been popularized in the early 2010s by Gojko Adzic and was later adapted by Tim Herbig to incorporate the terminology and concepts of impact, outcomes, and outputs.

Identify Relevant Actors

Similar to the KPI tree discussed in the first article of this series, an Impact Map follows a tree-like structure. But its levels are clearly defined. The root of the tree is formed by the intended impact which can be a goal, metric, or change in a metric. The impact level is followed by the actor level. Branching out from the impact, you list all system actors that play a direct or indirect role in creating the impact. Those actors can be external (e.g., customers, partners, or authorities) as well as internal (e.g., salespeople, customer support, or management).

In the case of Ricci’s team, the intention to increase the conversion rate serves as the starting point for the Impact Mapping process. Together with their guests from the other departments, they agree on first establishing a shared and more detailed understanding of how a lead is acquired and converted. To do so, they start mapping out a lead’s journey from its very first touchpoint with the university, through the different steps of information gathering and application, up to finally becoming an enrolled student.

In this journey map they document how the lead interacts with whom on the university’s side. All these touchpoints allow the group to identify the various actors involved in the conversion process. Among those are people from marketing, sales, admissions, university administration, and student success managers. Bit by bit, the group builds up the actor level of the Impact Map.

Interestingly, the group learns from the student success manager in the room that prospects in the process tend to actively reach out to existing students through channels like LinkedIn and Reddit to include first-hand experiences from others in their decision-making process. The interactions between prospects and existing students appear to have a positive influence on the decision to make the leap and apply for the program. Therefore, the group agrees to add “Existing Students” as another actor to their map.

Looking at the prospective student as the central actor in this process, the group feels the need to break it down into sub-actors to take a more detailed look at the prospect’s particular behaviors that influence a prospect’s progression through the acquisition funnel at the different steps. After a short discussion with the people from marketing, sales, and admission, the following sub-actors are added: “Unqualified Leads”, “Marketing-Qualified Leads (MQL)“, “Sales-Qualified Leads (SQL)”, and “Applicants”. Now, Ricci and their feel that their list of conversion-relevant actors is sufficiently detailed to move on.

Define Impactful Outcomes

The next level of your Impact Map is the outcome level. In this step, we seek to understand what observable behaviors of each of our actors, things they do or don’t do, play a relevant role in the decisive moments and processes that influence our goal. Ask yourself, how these behaviors would need to change to achieve your desired impact. These behavior are possible outcomes that provide you with potential levers to make progress toward your goal. Remember:

💡 Outcomes are the measurable changes in system actor behaviors in a given system context.

Now Ricci’s team starts to delve deeper into each actor’s role in converting a prospective student. For example, they learn that personal consultations with sales-qualified leads heavily correlate with those taking the next step and applying. However, they also find out that leads are very hesitant to book a call with a salesperson. So they note down as an outcome under “Marketing-Qualified Leads (SQL)”: “Be less hesitant to book a personal consultation”.

To allow us to follow Ricci’s team down a complete branch of their Impact Map, though, we join the group’s discussion of what role leads talking to existing students play in the conversion process. It turns out that some leads go to great lengths to find and get in touch with someone who’s currently studying in the Master’s program. What if the team would actively incentivize and support these conversations? The team understands that it would have to change the behaviors of two actors simultaneously to make this work reliably: the leads’ and the existing students’.

Together with their subject matter experts from sales and admissions, they decide that it should ideally be the marketing-qualified leads (MQLs) broadly adopting this desirable behavior of talking to current students. The team assumes that interacting with a “peer” who went down the same path is perceived as a more lightweight, informal, and trusted way to clarify burning questions than directly exposing oneself to a sales process. At the same time, there are promising signs that the confidence won by learning about the program from an actual student’s first-hand experience of studying remotely significantly increases the willingness to commit to the next steps. The group consequently decides to add the outcome “Connect with existing students more often” below “Marketing-Qualified Leads (MQL)”.

But as those “existing students” also need to be available and willing to enter into conversations with prospects, an additional outcome is added to the map below “Existing Students”: “Volunteer to talk to leads”.

In contrast to a KPI tree, the Impact Map leads us down from our circle of concern to relevant outcomes in our circle of influence from an actor-oriented perspective. And it doesn’t stop there but will take us even further on our path to meaningful action in our circle of control. Enter the output level.

Brainstorm Solution Ideas

The outcome level is where you and your team can fully indulge yourselves in the solution space. Simply asking “How might we?”, you can inspire a collaborative ideation process that produces a multitude of possible interventions, things you could do or build to make the actor of interest change their behavior as intended. Aim for quantity over quality first before you discuss, reduce (e.g. using dot-voting or ICE/RICE scoring), and add the most relevant suggestions to the Impact Map.

Ricci and their team ended up with quite a lot of outcomes. So they decide to focus their further efforts on what the group considers as most promising. Together with the people from sales and admissions, they perform a quick dot-voting. The result shows how excited everyone in the room is about the idea to connect leads with existing students.

With this clear focus defined, Ricci now rephrases the outcome as a “How might we” (or HMW) question, “How might we make our marketing-qualified leads connect with existing students?”, to kick off brainstorming for potential solutions. The team comes up with ideas like “Offer LinkedIn group with students to talk to”, “Invite leads to events with students”, “Provide an open calendar with meeting slots”, and many more. After they have collected all the ideas and spread them out on a huge whiteboard, Ricci walks everybody in the room through the list. Sticky by sticky, they do a high-level ICE scoring, jotting down each idea’s impact (as its assumed effect on the goal of improving the conversion rate), the group’s confidence in the idea (how likely they think the idea will work), and the roughly estimated effort for implementing the idea (how hard is it to implement the idea). Based on this numeric score per idea, they sort the stickies in descending order and add the ten highest-rated to the Impact Map. The idea that came out at the very top is: “Display students to talk to in nurturing emails”

Test Before You Invest

Every output starts out initially as a high-level idea built on a lot of explicit and implicit assumptions that can make or break a successful outcome. But how can get going and take action quickly if we don’t know if we are on the right track? The answer is experimentation. To invest your resources wisely, you focus on the most promising outputs that, based on the current understanding, are most likely to enable an impactful outcome on the map. Think about fast, cheap, and low-effort ways to test critical aspects of your solution idea based on a testable hypothesis. With each experiment, you’ll learn, build up confidence in the solution, and increase your investment. Or you drop the idea if it turns out ineffective and move on to another one on the map.

With their agreement on the first solution idea to tackle, Ricci and their collaborators now have to decide on how to continue. Before they want to even start thinking about how to broadly incentivize current students to volunteer for having conversations with leads, they want to first learn whether leads will actually show the expected behavior of actively reaching out to existing students when given the opportunity. So the team defines a first low-effort experiment: They will get two first students to volunteer and present them in one of the first emails in the lead nurturing sequence, each with an image, a link to their LinkedIn profile, and a calendar with bookable time slots for a video call. The clicks on these links will be tracked. The team formulates the following hypothesis for their first experiment:

We believe that providing the possibility to directly reach out existing students
for our marketing-qualified leads
will lead to them connecting to existing students to learn about their first-hand experience in the program.

We will know this is true when we’ll see leads click the links at a high rate (>=25%) and get in touch with the students (>= 15%).

Running this experiment will allow them to learn, with very little investment, whether the solution idea is likely to work as expected or if they simply misjudged their observations of lead behavior. Due to the very narrow scope and lightweight implementation, they can confidently plan to implement it within the next week, get the first results a week later, and, based on these results, make informed decisions about their next steps.

Conclusion

The team and their collaborators from the other departments are more than satisfied with the results of their work. Within a very short amount of time, they made it all the way from a rather abstract goal through a wide range of outcomes down to a first action that clearly connects to the business impact the team aims to achieve. Impact Mapping allowed them to start developing, exploring, and testing a continuously emerging theory of change that spans all three circles of concern, influence, and control.

The Impact Map they created will allow them to explore further solutions and outcomes in a structured way, and think about and evaluate solution ideas collaboratively from various perspectives. And as an artifact, the map will serve them well as a tool for communication and alignment across departments and functions.

Impact Mapping is a powerful tool that enables you to navigate, break down, and, most importantly, tackle complex challenges in product management, business, and beyond. In our next article, we’ll get to know yet another popular method: The Opportunity Solution Tree (OST).

(This article was originally published in Decoding Product.)