1 tip & 3 resources per week to improve your Strategy, OKRs, and Discovery practices in less than 5 minutes. Explore my new book on realprogressbook.com
How to Identify High-Leverage Impacts
How to Identify
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Dear Reader,
An Impact is a metric that describes the achievement of a company- or department-level priority. It's a lagging indicator that changes as a result of multiple compounding efforts, but is not linkable to one individual feature or activity. Most Impacts fall into one of five categories:
- Growth
- Engagement
- Monetization
- Satisfaction
- Process Quality
From Vague to Specific: Impact Examples
The specificity of your Impact determines how clear the starting context for structuring the lower-level elements of your Impact Map is. "Increase revenue" is unspecific and doesn't help a team narrow its options. They could consider every user segment and would have to work with very broad explorative questions in qualitative interviews.
"Achieve +34% margins from self-service Australian agency customers," however, is more specific and gives teams a concrete starting point about the target market and the business shift that should be achieved. The team would have a specific target audience they could recruit for interviews, surveys, or analytics reports. They would focus their initial exploration on the additional services or tools these customers use, and they could start exploring which additional features to offer in their own product to increase margin from existing customers.
Your Impact provides a strategic starting context that guides how you'll adapt your Discovery approach. It doesn't matter whether this context emerges from a fully formed strategy document or a pressing business need—what matters is that it orients your Discovery decisions and helps you adapt your methods to what truly needs to be learned.
The Impact keeps Product Discovery targeted by giving teams segmentation criteria for the following Actor level of an Impact Map, so that they don't get lost in exploring every possible segment.
These exemplary Impacts can kickstart your inspiration:
- Increase paid membership penetration by 25% until end of the year (Monetization)
- Reduce average infrastructure outages by 48% until 2027 (Process Quality)
- Increase the average selling price of private auctions to 450€ (Monetization)
- Bring the Customer Effort Score to an average of 4 (Satisfaction)
Finding Your Impact Sources
When you're ready to define your Impact, two practical sources can provide immediate clarity:
Product Strategy Statements often contain implicit Impact metrics. For example, if your Product Strategy says "We break into the market of Asian SMEs by improving the self-service capabilities for setup and integrations," you could derive an Impact like "Increase completed self-service integration setups by Asian customers by 25%."
Company or Department OKRs frequently contain metrics that can serve as Discovery Impacts. For example, if your Company OKRs include "Reduce time from lead to demo by 50%," this could be adopted as-is for your Discovery Impact you're contributing to.
Remember that your Impact doesn't need to be perfect to be useful—what matters is that it provides enough specificity to guide your next Discovery decisions (like which user segments to consider for problem exploration). You can always refine it as you learn more.
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Thank you for Practicing Product,
Tim
PS: My coffee discovery of the week was this amazing creation by elbgold, which I was able to pick up and enjoy in person this week, just before an all-day Metrics Tree workshop in Hamburg.
How to Dive Deeper into Product Discovery
Learn how I helped companies like Deutsche Telekom and Forto hone their Product Discovery practices. I closely work with product organizations through workshops and coaching to introduce and adapt Product Discovery.
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As a Product Management Coach, I guide Product Teams to measure the real progress of their evidence-informed decisions.
I focus on better practices to connect the dots of Product Strategy, Product OKRs, and Product Discovery.
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1 tip & 3 resources per week to improve your Strategy, OKRs, and Discovery practices in less than 5 minutes. Explore my new book on realprogressbook.com
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