User Story Mapping Posted on Jan 27, 2016 by Corinna in Agile & Lean, Product Management |

Story Mapping as a fantastic method to plan a product (or feature), sort user stories into releases and to serve as a backlog on steroids during development. We have to thank Jeff Patton for popularizing this approach.

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User Story Mapping

When working with stories in a backlog, it is easy to get lost in details, making it hard to prioritize. A better solution might be a User Story Map – Essentially a 2-dimensional backlog that captures the big picture of user activities and makes it easy to plan out what level of functionality needs to be in which release. Here’s an example:

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To create a map start with the overarching activities, the “Backbone”,. In the row below the backbone you list user tasks. Tasks have a column of related sub tasks and refinining user stories below them. Once your map is “finished”, walk a variety of people through it and refine. You typically build the software from left to right, starting with the “Walking Skeleton”.

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