User story mapping is a collaborative exercise that helps align cross-functional teams around building a product that will be better tomorrow than it is today. For this reason, any team whose work will contribute to the successful delivery of customer value should be represented.
Since a user story map creates a holistic view of the product, it is helpful to include members of any team responsible for architecting the complete product experience. These teams are often represented in a user story mapping exercise:
Engineering
UX / design
Product management
Sales
Marketing
Customer support
Ops / IT
Finance
Legal
How does user story mapping work?
User story mapping starts with a decision about what medium to use for building the story map. It can be done with simple physical resources such as a wall or whiteboard and sticky notes, or with a variety of software tools that are available to create a virtual map. Virtual planning may be helpful for distributed teams. Regardless of the medium, teams will want to take the following steps:
Frame the problem What is the problem your product solves for customers, or what job does it help them do? Taking a goal-first approach is critical in mapping the work that follows, and teams need to ensure they are mapping the customer’s goal.
Understand the product’s users Who is the target audience for your product? There is likely more than one. Different audiences can have different goals and ways of interacting with your product. Starting this exercise with a set of user personas can ensure that teams share an understanding of the target audience and build stories from that point of view. It also eliminates wasted effort on edge cases that are not a fit for your target audience.
Map user activities All users who interact with a product will likely do so through a series of common activities. These activities also referred to as themes or functions form the backbone of the user story map.
Map user stories under activities With the backbone in place and major themes defined, the team can now build out the skeleton of the map by breaking down each activity or theme into smaller user stories.
Flow and prioritize With the high-level themes and detailed user stories in place, the next step is to prioritize stories, ranking them vertically so that the most important ones are at the top. Then, teams map how users flow through the product typically from left to right. If a product has multiple types of users, teams may want to map different scenarios for each. These actions help teams decide which stories are vital and which ones are less important to delivering a delightful product experience to the target audience(s).
Identify gaps, dependencies, technical requirements, and alternatives The story map gives teams the ability to envision upfront the potential issues that may slow them down later, such as bottlenecks, dependencies, technical architecture, or missing information and capabilities. Identifying these risks before design or development work begins can help teams minimize and mitigate them, enhance usability, and come up with alternative solutions.
Plan sprints and releases This is where teams turn a visual exercise into executable work. With stories prioritized from the top-down, teams can see the work that will deliver the most value in the shortest time and group these stories into development sprints and product releases. Teams will create horizontal “slices” across the map, grouping stories by priority within each critical user activity. It is important to consider that this is not about identifying what is required for a minimum viable product; rather, it is critical for identifying the most important work to be completed to create a delightful customer experience.