Tim Herbig

Shows how Impact Mapping helps teams connect features to user problems and business goals through visual levels. Useful when discovery feels unfocused and ideas need to be tied back to outcomes.

Petra Wille

Explains how a KPI tree connects company goals to product metrics and customer behavior, with simple steps to build one on a whiteboard. Useful when teams cannot tell which numbers matter or how their work ties to strategy.

Jaydev Ajit Kumar

Uses the Karate Kid story arc to frame design presentations, casting the user as the hero and walking through their problem and change. Useful when prepping a design pitch or signoff and you want a clear narrative shape.

Shahed Khalili

Maps Pixar's storytelling rules onto product manager and UX designer work, including the Story Spine for setting up problem and resolution. Useful when pitching ideas to engineers, marketing, or customers and you want a clear narrative shape.

Rahul Abhyankar

Conversation between Rich Mironov and Rahul Abhyankar on Now-Next-Later roadmaps and how to use them with B2B and exec audiences. Useful when adapting NNL to a B2B environment and you want senior PM perspectives.

Janna Bastow

Origin story of the Now-Next-Later roadmap, which trades dates for time horizons so teams can stay outcome-focused. Useful when timeline roadmaps are forcing brittle commitments and you want a cleaner format.

Pandu Budikusuma

Defines user journey maps as data-driven views of user feelings and goals through a product, plus how to share them with engineers and stakeholders. Useful when journey maps feel like decoration and you want them to drive design choices.

Leyla Acaroglu

Walks through analog systems-mapping tools like the Interconnected Circles Map for exploring relationships, intervention points, and gaps. Useful when a problem feels tangled and you want a hands-on way to see how parts of the system connect.

Roman Pichler

Argues that great product roadmaps are goal-oriented, shared, and actionable, with practical advice for each quality. Useful when a roadmap is mostly a feature list and you want to refocus it on outcomes the whole team supports.

Ian Roberts

Splits the customer journey into pre-purchase, purchase, and post-purchase phases and overlays psychological mechanisms like mental shortcuts on each one. Useful when an operational journey map is missing the why behind customer choices and you need a behavioral-science layer.

Joey Zeledon

Lists five concrete ways public health programs use journey maps to support behavior change, including building empathy, spotting gaps in interventions, and finding micro-solutions. Useful when planning a behavior-change program and you want to compare client experiences across steps.

Colin Shaw

Lays out five rules for journey mapping that account for emotion, memory, and the subconscious side of customer decisions. Useful when a standard journey map feels too flat and you want to find the hidden moments that actually drive value.

Contentsquare

Contentsquare's guide collects 21 customer journey KPIs across awareness, consideration, decision, and retention stages. Useful when a CX or product team wants a quick map of which KPIs sit at each step of the journey.

Bandan Jot Singh

Bandan Jot Singh adapts Gibson Biddle's DHM model into a Strategy-Metric-Tactic approach using proxy metrics to test directions over weeks. Useful when a product team wants to make DHM concrete with measurable bets each cycle.

Swapnali Thakar

Introduces impact mapping with the Why, Who, How, What questions to connect business goals to UX work. Useful when a UX team needs to show that initiatives will move a real business outcome.

Magnus Dahlgren

Magnus Dahlgren uses impact mapping to determine value of product work. Useful when a team is trying to defend or kill a feature based on its real value.

Gerie Owen

Gerie Owen shows how to apply impact mapping to software projects with examples. Useful when a software team wants a worked example before trying it themselves.

Kurt Bittner

Kurt Bittner extends impact mapping to surface deeper product insights. Useful when teams find classic impact maps too thin for real product decisions.

Emily Horgan

Emily Horgan asks if impact mapping is a service designer's secret weapon. Useful when a service designer is choosing a tool for a complex multi-team project.

John Cutler

John Cutler shows 11 ways to visualize product development work. Useful when a team needs a diagram to align stakeholders on how work flows.

Nick Jenkins

Reflects on using impact mapping to guide product work toward measurable outcomes instead of long backlogs. Useful when a team is drowning in feature lists and wants to refocus on impact.

Anna Vasyukova

Surveys common UX mapping techniques like journey, service, empathy, and impact maps and when to use each. Useful when a team is unsure which map will best frame the problem at hand.

Tim Herbig

Tim Herbig contrasts impact mapping with related techniques like opportunity solution trees. Useful when picking which planning tool fits the kind of decision your team is making.

Jake Brereton

Explains impact mapping as a way to link goals, actors, behaviors, and product bets in one diagram. Useful when teams want a shared map that ties work to outcomes leaders care about.

Jeff Sauro, PhD, Jim Lewis, PhD

Jeff Sauro and Jim Lewis at MeasuringU explain leading vs lagging UX metrics as a causal chain, with SUS feeding NPS over time. Useful when teams want a research-grounded view of how UX metrics relate to each other.

Aga (Agnieszka) Szóstek

Aga Szóstek argues that being numbers-driven only works if metrics cascade from actions to strategic KPIs in a clean causal chain. Useful when a team claims to be data-driven but cannot show why their daily work moves the big numbers.

Ciprian (Chip) Borodescu

Ciprian Borodescu introduces user intent graphs — a way to map intelligent journeys for users in AI-driven products. Useful when a team building AI experiences needs a model for representing what users want at each turn beyond a linear flow.

David Theil

David Theil shows how user story mapping can sharpen product strategy — by aligning team and stakeholders on the user journey and the bets baked into it. Useful when a strategy doc feels disconnected from the backlog and a PM wants a tool that ties them together.

Miro

Miro template for user story mapping — pre-built columns and frames a team can copy into a board to run a mapping session. Useful when a PM wants to run a story-mapping workshop tomorrow and does not want to build the board from scratch.

Kuldeep Kulshreshtha

Kuldeep Kulshreshtha's review of Jeff Patton's User Story Mapping book — what it covers, who it is for, and the key takeaways. Useful when a team is deciding whether to read the book and wants a quick verdict before buying copies.

Jeff Patton

Jeff Patton — who literally wrote the book on story mapping — argues the new backlog should be a map, not a flat list, so teams see the user's whole experience. Useful when a team feels lost in their backlog and a PM needs the original argument for switching to a map.

Anna Kaley

Anna Kaley from NN/g explains user story mapping in agile — how the map shows the user's journey, surfaces gaps, and orders work into releases. Useful when a team has a flat backlog and a PM needs a way to see the journey shape and pick the slice for the next release.

Nora Guerrera

Nora Guerrera on better design through experience mapping. Useful when teams want mapping to lead to real design changes.

Alice Walker

Alice Walker's plain-language guide to user experience mapping. Useful when teams new to mapping want a simple intro.

Justin Morales

Justin Morales's guide to experience mapping for UX design. Useful when designers want a structured approach to mapping.

Jen Clinehens

Jen Clinehens shares how to create a customer journey map. Useful for teams new to journey mapping who need a clear walkthrough.

Leandro Agro'

Leandro Agro's seven-axis experience mapping tool. Useful when teams want a richer way to map experience beyond a simple journey line.

Navdeep Singh Gill

Beginner's guide to experience mapping processes and their advantages. Useful when teams new to mapping want a clear primer.

Nick Komarov

Story of building an experience map step by step at an AI startup. Useful when teams want a real walkthrough before mapping their own product.

Niall O'Connor

Niall O'Connor's guide to building an experience map from research. Useful when researchers and designers map an end-to-end experience together.

Heath Umbach

How-to on creating great UX through experience mapping. Useful when teams want a starter guide before mapping a product.

Jay Melone

Jay Melone on connecting OKRs to design sprints so the sprint output ties back to strategy. Useful when a team is running sprints in isolation from their OKRs and wants a way to bridge the two.

Chinar Khartadkar

Chinar Khartadkar on adapting impact mapping with personal twists and tweaks for real teams. Useful when a team has tried by-the-book impact mapping and wants ideas to make it fit their context.

Patrick Roos

Patrick Roos on how an agile org uses impact mapping to track and explain its impact. Useful when a leader wants to use impact mapping at the org level, not just per project.

Courtney Burry

Courtney Burry shares the four steps to create an impact map, with examples from product teams. Useful when a team wants a quick recipe to run impact mapping in a single session.

Tim Herbig

Tim Herbig explains impact mapping as a way to focus on outcomes in product management. Useful when a PM wants a clean technique for tying their team's work to outcomes instead of feature lists.

Mark Levison

Mark Levison walks through impact mapping in depth with examples and a worked map. Useful when a team has heard of impact mapping and now wants to actually try one with a guided example.

Mark Dalgarno

Mark Dalgarno's plain explainer of impact mapping with a simple example. Useful when someone is meeting impact mapping for the first time and needs a friendly intro.

Gojko Adzic

Gojko Adzic's home for impact mapping, a lightweight planning method that links work to business goals through users and behaviors. Useful when a team's roadmap feels disconnected from outcomes and they want a visual that fixes the link.

Okan Yenigün

Walks through modeling user and system interactions and behavior with concrete diagrams. Useful when a designer or engineer needs to model behavior before writing detailed specs.

Alastair Allen

Argues why visualizing software architecture is important and how teams can do it well. Useful when a tech lead is making the case for architecture diagrams in a team that has been skipping them.

Jan Christian Alvestad

Jan Christian Alvestad on how to write good software architecture diagrams that engineers actually use. Useful when an engineer or tech lead is making an architecture diagram for review and wants it to land.

Martin Wright

Martin Wright shows how simple diagrams sell ideas and build visual literacy on a team. Useful when a designer or strategist wants to convince stakeholders with sketches instead of long memos.

Georgina G.

Plain step-by-step guide to drawing your first state diagram, with a worked example. Useful when someone new to state diagrams wants a friendly starter so they can ship one this week.

Reddit, Inc.

Reddit systems engineering thread on how teams handle states and modes in complex products. Useful when an engineer is wrestling with state design and wants peer takes from outside their team.

Katrina Clokie

Katrina Clokie explains visual test models and state transition diagrams as tools for testers. Useful when a tester or QA engineer wants to map app states before writing test cases to find missing paths.

Yu-kai Chou

Yu-kai Chou breaks down the four phases of a player's journey and how to design for each. Useful when a team wants to map their onboarding and engagement loops to a known journey model.

Rebecca Niles

Video case study of systems mapping applied to a real project, showing the map being built and discussed. Useful when a team learns better from watching a worked example than reading one.

Miguel Pantaleon

Walks through systems thinking and mapping with an example case, showing the steps from problem to map. Useful when a team wants a worked example before trying systems mapping themselves.

Derek Cabrera

Derek Cabrera explains systems mapping using his DSRP framework with simple visuals. Useful when a team has read about systems thinking and now wants a structured way to actually draw the system.

Reddit, Inc.

Reddit post in a DID community where someone shares their personal system map and reflections. Useful when a reader wants to see how an everyday person uses system mapping for their own life rather than for work.

Leyla Acaroglu

Leyla Acaroglu walks through systems mapping as a tool for systems thinkers, with cluster maps and connection maps explained. Useful when a team is staring at a messy problem and wants a way to see all the moving parts.

Reddit, Inc.

Reddit thread on translating high-level business outcomes into concrete product outcomes a team can act on. Useful when a PM has a top-down KPI and is staring at it wondering what their team should actually go build.

Vijay Balachandran

Vijay Balachandran shows how to use input metrics (proxy metrics) to drive a North Star like GMV in e-commerce. Useful when PMs need to translate a top-line metric into the daily numbers that move it.

Konstantin D

Konstantin Drozdov explains how a metrics pyramid surfaces dependencies between metrics and ties consumer-value North Star to revenue. Useful when product teams need to decompose top-level metrics into actionable parts.

Mingtao Wu

Mingtao Wu introduces the ION Pyramid - Input metrics drive Outputs which drive a Northstar - as a fast way to define product metrics in interviews or quick discovery. Useful when PMs need a simple structure that works under time pressure.

Felix Pratamasan

Felix Pratamasan organizes metrics like a company structure - operations, middle management, executives - so day-to-day work stays aligned with strategy. Useful when teams drown in metrics and can't tell which ones really matter.

ProductPlan

ProductPlan's SaaS Product Metrics Pyramid stacks a North Star metric on top, action metrics in the middle, and granular indicators at the bottom. Useful when SaaS teams want a focused metrics structure that avoids analysis paralysis.

Mikhail Karpov

Michael Karpov shows how a hierarchy of metrics ties feature work to the company's primary metric through a chain: primary -> key product metric -> 3-5 input metrics. Useful when PMs want to predict whether a feature will actually move the needle.