What Is Story Mapping In Product Management?

What is user story mapping?

Introduced by Jeff Patton, user story mapping is a visual method in which teams outline the work requirements that achieve the best end-user experience. It helps prioritize the most important work and allows product teams to gain a deeper understanding of what customers want.

User stories are written statements that define customer needs and the business value generated by them. They describe customer journeys that, in turn, drive product development.

What are the benefits of user story mapping?

Story mapping helps teams build successful products by organizing internal workflows. Here are the key benefits of story mapping in product management:

1. Keeps the focus on end-user needs with a user-centric design approach
2. Prioritizes the most important tasks first and organizes remaining work into smaller releases
3. Provides a clear list of product requirements by breaking down a larger task into smaller chunks
4. Delivers customer value faster by grouping work into smaller iterations and incorporating feedback from customers
5. Visualizes potential product obstacles and dependencies in advance so risks can be mitigated
6. Cultivates a shared team understanding of customer experience that increases team engagements around what to build, how to build, and why

How does story mapping in product management work?

Story mapping in product management can be done with a pen and paper, whiteboard and sticky notes, or an online story mapping tool.

Here are the core steps in developing effective user story maps for product management:

Identify and outline the issue

Identify and outline the exact problem you hope to solve for the customer. Thinking from an end user’s perspective helps to map all critical activities to the customer’s goals.

Understand your product’s end-users

Define several user personas that help the product team understand their target audience. Then, create user stories for each audience, as various audiences may engage differently with your product.

Discover user activities

The majority of customers take common steps to interact with a product. For example, users of an online search platform may enter a keyword, review search results on the first page, and click on a chosen website to find the information they’re looking for. These user activities are also known as themes.

Align the user themes with user stories

When the major product themes/user activities are defined, it is time to break down these broader areas into smaller user stories.

For example, under the search results area, a possible user story could be: “As a search engine user, I want to find a relevant result for the search query as I don’t want to see decades-old results.”

Prioritize user stories

Rank all user stories vertically, starting with the most important ones at the top. By doing this, your team will get an actionable workflow aligned with the customer’s journey. If a product has diverse audiences, different scenarios can be mapped for each one of them.

Have a plan in place

To create a successful product, you must plan everything out. Teams that complete an effective story mapping exercise can envision potential obstacles well in advance, including technical requirements, dependencies, market risks, or lack of capabilities or information.

Execute the work

The last step is to execute the user story. Similar stories can be grouped into product releases or development sprints. The focus is to deliver an outstanding customer experience instead of just creating a minimum viable product.

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