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Visualising Product Strategy with Impact Maps - a self-paced online learning course

Description

This adaptive learning online course looks at Impact Mapping – a tool that maps between goals and deliverables and vice versa.

Agile product development is not just about delivering features. It is about achieving outcomes, meeting the needs of customers and users in a way that benefits the organisation. Traditional product management tends to focus on outputting the highest possible number of deliverables at the lowest possible cost. This risks wasting development effort on features that are not wanted and therefore have no value.

Products and product features are vehicles for experimentation in the delivery of business value. The Impact Mapping tool gives visual traceability between goals and potential deliverables in terms of the assumptions about them. The content of an Impact Map is easily accessible and digestible and provides evidence for the validation (or invalidation) of any given feature by its contribution to the goal, and options for further experimentation.

It is a powerful tool that a Product Owner can use to keep the Scrum Team, and the stakeholder community focused on the outcomes to be achieved.

Why This Course?

·        Upgrade your Product Owners’ skills – use Impact Maps as collaboration tools that involve stakeholders and Developers and keep them goal-focused.

·        Learn how to identify key actors – People who by changing their behaviour can move the needle on the dial closer to the goal

·        Validate potential features - by their ability to trigger behaviour changes in human beings

·        Add another visualization tool - to your toolkit for communicating and collaborating with Developers and stakeholders

Who is This Course Suitable For?

Whether a Product Owner, Product Manager, Portfolio Manager, Program Manager or a Business Analyst, or someone who needs to understand Agile product development, then this course is for them.

What They’ll Come Away With

After completing this adaptive learning course, attendees will have learned that Impact Mapping is a powerful way of visualizing assumptions about the relationship between specific deliverables and the outcome to be achieved: one that lays out the options for rapid experimentation to validate or invalidate those assumptions.

They’ll be able to:

·        Facilitate workshops with stakeholders that visualize the relationships between potential deliverables and the goal that they contribute to

·        Understand how in most products and services, value is created by changing the current behaviour of human beings to those which progress the desired outcome.

·        Identify actors – people who might benefit from the product, or people who have an interest in obstructing the achievement of the goal – and their behaviours that need to change for the goal to be met

·        Understand that deliverables on an Impact Map– projects at portfolio level or feature requests at product level – are just unordered options for experimentation

·        Prioritize deliverables based on assumptions as to the size of their impact on the goal – and run experiments to validate those assumptions

·        Damp down on ‘solutionising’ in inflight projects by reverse engineering Impact Maps from a list of proposed deliverables

·        Apply tactics in a workshop that move Developers’ focus from technical solutions to the User and/or Business Goals they need to achieve

·        Throw out feature requests from your Product Backlog that cannot be linked to the goal through changed behaviours

What Topics are Covered?

The ‘Impact Mapping’ course has five modules, with a total of 59 learning objectives and 158 probes.

Delivering Business Value

·        Defining Business Value

·        Using the ‘Chain of Goals’ to synchronize product planning around outcomes

·        The importance of measurement

·        Measuring what matters

Structure of an Impact Map

·        The anatomy of an Impact Map (Goal, Actors, Impact, Deliverables)

·        The underlying assumptions of Impact Maps

·        The need to change human (i.e., Actors’) behaviours to achieve goals

·        Deliverables as options for experimentation

Using Impact Maps

·        Defining a goal or sub-goal

·        Drawing a skeleton map

·        Identifying actors and their changed behaviours required to meet the goal

·        Deliverables as potential triggers for changed behaviour

·        The concept of a learning budget

Reaping the Benefits of Impact Mapping

·        The benefits of impact mapping

·        Tactics for prioritisation of the list of potential deliverables

·        Driving incremental delivery and iterative development with impact mapping

·        Ensuring the strategic alignment of the product

·        Impact mapping in both upfront and continuous product discovery

Reverse-Engineering an Impact Map

·        Moving from ‘solutions’ to goals

·        Impact maps for in-flight development

·        Orphan deliverables and their treatment

·        Dealing with legacy systems

What the Course Includes:

·        High-quality instruction with slideshows supported by an audible coach’s text, created by Agile expert and Certified Scrum Trainer, Alan O’Callaghan

·        Multiple probes for each Learning Objective

·        Immediate feedback to answers, including remediation where appropriate.

Different pricing models apply depending on the size of your organisation. Please contact maria@emerald-hill.co.uk to book a conversation.