Goal and Insight Impacts

Question

I'm hoping to get some clarification on the Goal Impact and Insights Impact fields so I don't use them incorrectly or provide incorrect information to my team members. Can someone tell me how we should look at these? I see they are subjective measures, but what should we be thinking about when applying a value? These are both impacts, but impacts on what?

Is the goal impact a measure of how much this particular idea impacts the ability to achieve the goal? I'm less clear on how to think about the insight impact. The thing I keep asking myself is, impact on what?

Thanks for the help!

Tanguy Crusson · Answer

Well, once again @Jonathan Hau you beat me to it! Thank you 😊

@David We've built the system in a way that lets you define the framework you plan to use to prioritize your roadmap collaboratively and communicate these priorities. The default project template, as well as every field in there, are just here to help you understand the type of use cases we designed the app for.

But what we recommend is you go through it with your team and define what these fields, and their values, mean in your context. Because in the end we don't see prioritization as a numbers game (even when using formulas!). Rating fields, insights impact, ... : these things are just simple primitives to help you answer:

* As a team, how should we prioritize what is important for us to focus on? 
* How can we make prioritization something that's not purely based on opinions, gut feel, or who has the loudest voice in the room?
* How can we get alignment with our stakeholders, so they can both understand how we prioritize things and contribute to the prioritization in a constructive way? (vs just telling us what to do)
* How can we progressively get better at this as we keep iterating?

So, for example, we don't recommend prioritizing based on a number of votes. BUT voting can be a very useful exercise to understand if, as a team, or with you're stakeholders, you're aligned or not:

* Pre-select a list of ideas, vote on them as a team
* Reveal the votes - and find out if you're aligned or not
* More often than not, you'll probably discover you have areas of misalignment
* You discuss these differences
* Then after that's done, run a vote again - did you gain alignment?

Jonathan Hau_z7minn · Answer

Hi David,

I think each organization might think of things slightly differently. The way we do things in my org is the following:
- Goal Impact: Firstly, we don't allow our PMs to fill this 1-5 rating until they set a goal in the goal field. For us it's our OKRs. Each idea must have only 1 assigned OKR. (We know almost every idea can impact all OKRs, so we ask PMs which one is the idea most relevant to.) Then, we ask the PM to answer the question: "How much does delivering the idea in the description header impact that OKR?" Add a rough guesstimate on a 1-5 scale for that value.

- Insights Impact: We don't use this field. But, if we did, I would ask the PM to answer the question: "How much does delivering the idea in the description contribute to resolving the Insights attached to the idea?"

This being said, it's not a hard science. This is meant to be an exercise of rough approximation, with the intent to see the relative value scores (in order to understand stack ranked priority against other ideas.)

Hope this helps!