USER MAPPED HOW TO

Helping your users be more awesome is what makes products successful. The benefits of using a user story map to create your backlog include: Bringing this cross-functional group together to map out the user’s journey, we can more easily drive out assumptions, risks and dependencies.

USER MAPPED HOW TO

Lucky for us then that Jeff Patton realised this early on and developed a technique to help us understand how our users might use our product and how to translate that into user stories that have a natural sequence and hierarchy.Ĭreating user story maps in workshops with users, UX, developers, testers and stakeholders, we can build a shared understanding of the product, a common domain language and an appreciation or empathy that spans more than just our particular interests. The temptation to build some ‘necessary infrastructure’ until we’re ready to build stuff for users or worse still create an arbitrary story value system based on the seniority of the requestor, can be huge. Even more so if you are staring at a blank page wondering where to start. It can be tricky to prioritise hundreds of stories divorced from their context and held in a spreadsheet or JIRA repository. By creating a user story map you are generating options for value delivery.

A user story map can help you answer the question: “What should we deliver next that provides the most value?”.

Either way, you need to know which of them are the highest value features are so that you can build them next. Or maybe you’re right at the beginning of your project, and you haven’t written any yet. Stories gathered and written during many user story writing workshops. Suppose for a moment that you have a spreadsheet with three-hundred user stories in it.

User mapped