Product Management 101: Product Discovery and Impact Mapping Technique
In this story, I will be letting you know about the Product Discovery process and one of its technique known as Impact Mapping. My first story in the Product Management 101 series which covers the basics of product management can be found here.
What is Product Discovery?
“Product discovery refers to the activities required to determine if and why a product should be developed. Carrying out this work makes it more likely to create a product users actually want and need” — Roman Pichler
Why you should focus on Product Discovery?
Once you are done with your Product Roadmap planning, the Product Manager should move towards creating the Product Backlog, prioritizing it and starting a Sprint if following an agile methodology for development.
However, before creating the product backlog, how does a Product Manager define the features or stories that have been discussed and agreed upon in the product roadmap meeting but are not yet fully detailed. Here, the process of Product Discovery comes into play.
Product Discovery helps an organization to see whether its planned features or additions to the product are in alignment with the overall company goals or not. It makes it very simple to just write off the features that do not add to a goal as we will see in the Impact mapping technique used in the Product discovery process later on.
According to my experience, there are two types of feature requests or enhancements in a product:
- A feature that is actually required and the Product Manager is well aware of its existence and priority
- A feature that is to be implemented because the stakeholders need it and the PM has to align it towards the goal in a reverse mechanism (That is your role and you know it well 😉
Usually, the product discovery process helps to identify the details required in integrating key features to the product and is often discovered or finalized by discussing the say with the key stakeholders. More or less, the key people involved in the Product Discovery process should consist of:
- Customers or End-Users (The most important element)
- Department Heads (Those who understand their respective end-users well)
- Company Heads (Those who have a long term vision of the product and know the customers much better)
If you see, the common thing in the above list is the CUSTOMER and ultimately it becomes a User-Centric design approach in which we move ahead with the product discovery. As a product manager, you are required to sit and discuss with each of the above-listed segments of people but practically it becomes tough to discuss or get information for understanding directly with end-users or customers. In this case, most of the time, your experience with the industry comes into the picture and combining it with the data available and the insights you get from the different department heads, you will have ample data to make decisions. What happens when you do not have sufficient data? We will cover this topic in one of my later stories.
Given this, the product discovery process becomes the backbone of your product backlog, particularly when new feature additions are about to take place or we are going through re-iteration of a current feature.
There are many different processes and techniques available for Product Discovery. Over here, I am going to explain to you about a technique know as Impact Mapping.
Impact Mapping Technique
The Impact Mapping technique is one of the most simple and effective techniques used for Product Discovery. There are 4 main stages involved in the Impact Mapping technique.
- Goal (Why?)
- Actor (Who?)
- Impact (How?)
- Deliverables (What?)
Defining all of the above stages one by one will help you discover the product features that are in line with your company’s goal. Let’s take an example to better understand each of the stages.
Goal
The goal is the primary objective of the story or feature for which you are adding or making an enhancement to your product. It covers the WHY? of the impact mapping and should answer for what you are aiming to achieve with the addition or iteration.
Any goal should be a S.M.A.R.T. goal
S — Specific
M — Measurable
A — Achievable
R — Relevant
T — Time-bound
Say the company has a goal stated as “To reduce the drop-off rate of users during the checkout process in an e-commerce app”. Typically there is a process in which a problem is identified beforehand and to solve that, we come up with a goal. Identifying the problem first in itself is a challenging task and you need to rely upon lots of data in formats of analytics, customer feedback, etc. and then start working on it. Now, the first question that should come to your mind should be is this a SMART goal? If not, make it one! How?
There is no specific template to write down a S.M.A.R.T. goal but you can learn more about it from this article — The Essential Guide to Writing S.M.A.R.T. Goals by Kate Eby.
Coming back to our own example, the stated goal is definitely not written properly so we need to restate it as:
This goal is specific (reduce the drop-off rate), measurable (below or above 30%?), achievable (looks so!), relevant (it has a direct impact on the business as it is related to sales), time-bound (1 month looks realistic).
You need to be always sure that the goal is measurable. You need to write down the measurement criteria of a goal that we will be discussing in another article altogether. It will cover the fine details and necessity to measure a goal and make us aware of its utmost importance.
Actor
Next, we need to list down who are the people who will be directly helping us in achieving our goal. This covers the WHO? of the process. Normally it is the end-user who needs to take certain actions in order for the goal to be accomplished but in many scenarios, there will be multiple actors who will work together or on their own to help us complete the goal.
In our case where we are developing an e-commerce application and want to reduce the drop-off rate during checkout process, the actor who is connected to our process is the app user himself or we can call him the potential customer whom we want to convert into a customer by making him check out on our app.
This is the most important starting point towards getting the features ready for our product. We just cannot get our Actors wrongly identified under any circumstances.
Impact
The third step in the Impact Mapping technique for product discovery is known as Impact and it covers the How? of the process. Over here, we need to assess that how can the actor actually act to get us closer towards our goal. It should make an impact on the overall user journey.
In our example, let us say that we identified that the drop-off rate is coming largely because of more no. of steps involved in the check out process that makes a user click and travel from one screen to another for more than 7 times after he goes on the Cart Page.
By running analytics and researching on the industry trends, we have identified that One-Page checkout is the best solution for an e-commerce app when it comes to checkout. So, the impact that we want our actor is to perform checkout in 2 simple steps instead of the current 7 steps making the no. of steps reduce by 70%
We can be certain on the impact as it will help us in achieving the goal if performed in the desired fashion. If you are a matured company, you can easily rely upon your own data for assumptions or else you will have to rely upon third-party data, your own customer feedbacks or insights from analytics platforms that you have integrated into your system. Impact is directly measurable to determine whether the goal you have set is being met or not.
Deliverables
The last and final section of the Impact Mapping technique is called the Deliverables and it covers the What? of the process. You know the goal, you know the actors, you are aware of the impact required to achieve your goal, so now you need to identify What should your actors perform? By listing down the actions, you will get a list of deliverables that are nothing but your product features list that you need to add or change in your current product.
In our example, say we had a long process of adding a new address first, then save it and come back on the cart screen for a review, then select the checkout option only to go to the select payment method screen and finally checkout! Taking more than 7 steps for a transaction to get complete is in anyways harmful from the overall UI/UX perspective. So, we decide upon the new deliverables to give the ability to the user to add a new address on the same page, see cart summary and also choose the payment method for easier one-page checkout as thought upon to create the overall impact.
Let us see how the Impact Mapping diagram looks like if we place all the 4 steps involved together on the same page. Generally, sticky notes are used on a board or wall to create this but one can also use simple tools like Excel.
There is a particular way in which we should read Impact Mapping diagram to make the most sense out of it. Look at the image above again and try to read it as per the following format:
I can achieve GOAL if my ACTOR is/are able to IMPACT by doing DELIVARABLES
So here you have your product features discovered by using of Impact Mapping technique. Time to get it noted down in the backlog. You should practice this exercise more often to master it as that is the only way. I hope you liked this article on Product Management 101: Product Discovery and Impact Mapping Technique
Check out valuable insights, tips, strategies and fundamentals on Product Management on my YouTube channel — Parth Amin’s YouTube Channel
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