Impact Mapping: What's Your Software Development Worth?

Healthy Developer

If you’ve ever been on a software project and wondered: “what’s the impact of the work I’m doing?”, impact mapping will help you immensely.

Knowing what your code is worth, or any other assets we create on software projects across any discipline (UX, QA, Infrastructure, Operations etc.) is crucial to both getting the rewards you want, and steering the company in the right direction.

In this episode I share how impact mapping can be used to identify a goal from a business model canvas (described in detail in my prior episode, link below) and map it to work team members do.

With a better understanding of the impact of your work, you can communicate things like “why are we doing this?“, “what is this work going to enable?” and “how do we know when we’re successful?“.

Impact mapping can be used not just with software development activities like programming and testing, but also with any activities, features, or tasks a team might consider to impact the business.

Advertising, partnerships, cost reduction, and other aspects of a business also benefit from having a map of impacts.

If your company hasn’t shared this information with you, have a conversation with your product manager or CEO to see if they can provide some insight to your work’s impact.

An important point I highlight at the end of the episode, is to not budget only for a single experiment identified through an impact map.

Most software development investments fail to fully realize their goals, so budgeting for multiple experiments will help.

This way you won’t have to go back to the business for more money after a “failure”, and instead get multiple attempts to reach the goal through trying several things that have an impact.

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