I recently attended a workshop around user story mapping, I had not heard of the concept before and thought the workshop was extremely useful.

Here’s what I learnt and took from the workshop.

The idea behind user story mapping is to look at the product backlog with a view of what the deliverable outcomes are, it is important to involve the whole team in this process to make sure you have transparency, collaboration and ensure everyone is on the same page.

Start by laying the user stories out on the table (or wall if needed) on the x axis and discuss the order in which the stories need to be completed in order to meet the deliverable outcome, this is the narrative flow. The team might find there are several variations or alternatives, these should be added on the y axis under the relevant user story.

The next step is to identify activities that could represent customer journeys, place these above the narrative flow line from the first step.

Then think of different scenarios that would result in a desired outcome and place the user stories needed to achieve the desired outcome above the backbone in the previous step, this set of user stories will become the minimum viable product based on the desired outcome, the team could do this a number of times using different scenarios that result in different desired outcomes.

Other things to think about whilst doing the user story mapping exercise would be the use of personas to think about who might carry out some or all of the activities identified in step 2.

For more information on user story mapping check out the book by Jeff Patton - User Story Mapping: Discover the Whole Story, Build the Right Product