What is Impact Mapping?
Impact Mapping is a method for breaking down goals to make them more actionable. The method takes a desired goal as a starting point, and then breaks it down, first by actors that can impact the goal, then for each actor how they could impact the goal, and lastly what deliverable could drive each such impact. A common criticism of the framework is that it does explicitly look at the outcomes for the users, but jumps directly from business impact to feature outcome (as opposed to its sibling method the Opportunity Solution Tree, which gets this right). Still, it is a common framework and good to know about.
Impact Mapping is a part of the work on goal setting done in the strategy part of the product management process.
