Strategic Impact Planning
Aligning product direction with long-term impact
Strategic Impact Planning makes product direction visible, intentional, and sustainable.
It connects product vision, priorities, and impact awareness in a way that guides teams over time.
This alignment clarifies direction and makes decisions accountable — not only in terms of business value, but also ecological, economic, and social impact.
Core Structure
Three strategic components — extended by Sustainability Anchors
Strategic Impact Planning is based on three core elements:
- A shared Product Vision — a clear view of what the product aims to achieve over time.
- A conscious Sustainability Intent — describing how the product supports ecological, economic, and social goals.
- A prioritized Work List — reflecting value, feasibility, and long-term responsibility.
These elements are extended through Sustainability Anchors — structured signals that surface ecological, economic, and social impact within each artefact.
They act as lenses for prioritization and help teams ground decisions in long-term responsibility.
This approach doesn’t replace existing planning structures — it extends them where it matters most.
Sustainable Decisions Across Time Horizons
Integrating sustainability into every layer of strategic planning
Strategic Impact Planning ensures that product direction is shaped with full awareness of its long-term consequences.
It introduces sustainability as a consistent decision lens — applied across all planning levels:
- Short-term: Deliver outcomes that are valuable and responsible, without introducing technical, ecological, or social debt.
- Mid-term: Expose hidden costs and system effects early to ensure architectural, operational, and ethical resilience.
- Long-term: Align product evolution with sustainability targets and systemic impact on users, systems, and the environment.
This clarity prepares teams to prioritize more effectively — with sustainability as a guiding principle.
Practical Decision Inputs
Making sustainability visible within every artefact
To support better prioritization, teams embed Sustainability Anchors into their planning artefacts.
These anchors are simple, observable signals — tailored to each dimension:
- Ecological: energy use, emissions, data size, waste
- Economic: maintainability, lifetime cost, system resilience
- Social: accessibility, inclusion, ethical impact
Sustainability Anchors don’t prescribe what to do — they make the impact inspectable and actionable.
They ensure that sustainability is part of the planning conversation — from the very beginning.
Final Note
Strategic Impact Planning aligns product goals with long-term responsibility.
It sharpens direction, exposes blind spots, and enables teams to make conscious, sustainable decisions — guided by clear values and anchored in transparency.
Sustainability in Green Agile is implemented without adding new meetings.
Instead, it is integrated into common Agile events. This ensures adoption is smooth, lightweight, and compatible with frameworks like Scrum, SAFe or Kanban.