User Story Mapping

I love working with agile! We work in scrum environment and follow biweekly sprints to get our work done. Work is in the form of user stories further broken down into tasks staged in to the product backlog. A user story is a brief description of a feature desired by the customer from his or her perspective. The typical format of a user story is – As a Sales Manager (customer), I want to send contracts electronically (goal) so that I can save time from manually sending the contracts (reason). It is the job of a business analyst to work with the customers to understand how they imagine a feature for the product. The business analyst structures the information collected in the form of a user story which is then staged on product backlog.

Each sprint, I see more work that gets done, while Scrum focuses on prioritizing the product backlog, we still miss the big picture view.I recently came across a new concept of breaking down big stories as you tell them called “Story Map”. The story map concept is about telling the entire story of your project, it begins with documenting the thinking on sticky notes which means document while the stakeholder is talking. Now create a visualization to support the project discussion. Place or stick the cards on a wall where everyone can see it. Arranged cards should answer some basic questions of what are we building? Why are we building it? What are the desired outcomes of the actions? Who will be using it and how will it be benefiting the user?What are the types of activities people would use the product for?

The cards are then organized based on which work is to be done now, that is “critical user stories for the project” and which ones are nice to have, “the not so important ones” can be pushed to the end. The concept of mapping the stories while the user is talking helps to identify the holes in the thinking. By brainstorming and continuous mapping we realize that many times we reach dead end walls that initially are realized as requirement but eventually end up as nice to have requirements . This is when the story mapping comes into the picture when you visually show the user by layering the sticky notes into various categories of identifying the critical requirements and pulling all the other related requirements to take the project till the finish line.

One important aspect of story mapping is to cover from the beginning till the end and not get lost into too much details the point is to cover the broader perspective of the project/user stories. By documenting the high level stuff on cards you eventually get the big things now these can be broken up into details. One of the greatest outcomes from the story mapping is, when you have too much to build it gives an idea to the stakeholders to minimize the product requirements and compress it to something feasible to fit in the timeline and budget.

Product backlog contains the entire list of the work needed to achieve a project. This is further prioritized based on the importance of the work – High, Medium and Low. Product backlog prioritization helps to understand what will be achieved next but it does not provide an overview of the big picture.

User Story Mapping helps to understand the entire functionality of the system and  the team to stay focused on the user requirements. Once the user story mapping is done the team clearly understands what they are building and why?. This helps to have better communication within themselves and the customers about the project from beginning till the end. The concept is very similar to a map, before we go for trekking by looking at a map we get an idea of the trail and what kind of journey we are expecting so there are no surprises, similarly with user story map you get a high level idea of the project and when your are actually working on a user story you would know at which location you are on the map. With this information you can get a fair idea of who is the end user involved, secondary users getting impacted, and stakeholders to be communicated.

Story mapping benefits:

• Provides broader view (big picture) of the backlog
• Helps to groom the product backlog in more efficient way
• Perfect for brainstorming and generating customer oriented user stories
• Graphical representation of the project
• Can be used to discuss the scope of the project
• Helps to visualize project progress and do reality check for the feasibility of the project
• Helps to do better project planning