How to use story mapping in agile development

The path to building innovative solutions lies in the art of story mapping. Many of us are familiar with the traditional user story format: 'As a..., I want to..., so that I can...' . However, adopting this format without a strategic foundation leads to disjointed, circular, and lackluster stories that fail to truly capture the user's journey.

It’s essential to understand that user stories (or job stories) should not be created as individual tickets. Nor should they be written merely based on feedback to fit the 'As a...' format. A single user story is but a single step or feature within a user experience. To help users achieve their job to be done, stories need to come from a thorough business analysis and form a coherent narrative with other stories.

Story mapping is an analysis approach that emphasises visualization of stories as interconnected diagram. That allows us to understand individual stories' place in the larger narrative. And better yet, helps us uncover stories we did not expect or think about! 

Let's dive in.

A lesson learned through pain

For three difficult years, I stood as the single product manager for a squad of 24 extremely capable developers and testers. Now, imagine the chaos if every user story I wrote was open to interpretation or lacked clarity. If the team didn't understand why they were building something and how did it fit with everything else. If they would question the scope of planned epics / releases.

I would've been perpetually stuck in calls, having to constantly explain my intent to the team. As a matter of fact, that is how it worked in the beginning...

It wasn't a sustainable or productive model. I realized fairly quickly that to survive and excel, I had to do more than jot down what seemed like clear requirements. I had to master the art of storytelling in business analysis. And I did. And we thrived. 

Let me share a bit of feedback from one of my previous teammates:

"I have worked with Ksawery for 4 years on the Elements project. What can I say, Ksawery is one of the best PMs that I've ever worked with.
A very friendly and honest person who knows how to listen, always paid attention to details, perfectly managed a team of 24 people."

 Volodymyr Danyliv 

The secret to my success wasn't working overtime. I just didn't spend that much time in calls and working sessions. The scope, the stories, the objective were always clear and gave development team a clear sense of direction. We rarely needed more than one or two sessions to align on what we were hoping to accomplish.

The bottom line is this: story mapping is worth it and helps you save enormous amount of time down the line. 

Story Mapping explained

So, what is story mapping? At its core, it is an alignment and analysis technique designed and popularized by Jeff Patton. It prescribes ordering of stories/ feature ideas alongside two dimensions:

• Horizontal user journey: First, we capture the journey user takes to complete their task. This is captured on two levels - 'job to be done' steps and specific activities involved in executing those steps. 
• Vertical importance: We then place our 'stories' (feature ideas) vertically under the journey steps. The most important story to support user through the journey is placed at the top. Additional enhancements and more sophisticated ideas are placed lower down.

The beauty of this technique is that it places each story in context, illuminating how each feature supports or enhances the user’s journey through the product. 

 

 

The original technique was meant to be used during collaborative workshops with the use of sticky notes and a wall. Hence why the story maps are depicted like the one above - with a lot of squares (sticky notes) of different colours. 

Story mapping for fit-gap analysis 

Let's delve into an analogy. Imagine planning a cross-country road trip. The journey map, the 'backbone' of the diagram, is akin to the route you'd chart out, marking all the cities you plan to visit. Your vehicle, rest stops, and activities are the features or stories. Without understanding the full route, you might invest in a luxurious RV with top-end facilities but find it can't navigate through narrow mountain passes, causing detours and delays. Story mapping ensures you choose the right vehicle and amenities for the entire journey, not just one leg of it.

Photo by Nick Seagrave on Unsplash

One of the standout advantages of story mapping is it makes it extremely easy for us to uncover gaps. With our stories laid out against the user journey, any user steps without corresponding features become glaringly evident. These are the 'missing links' that might have slipped through the cracks in a traditional development process.

The visual fit-gap analysis is the first major way this techniques help us in agile development. The premise of agile is that we focus on iterative, flexible approach. We focus on developing small capabilities quickly, we release them, gain feedback from our users, and improve upon it. And then we repeat. However, it is much easier to get feedback if users actually use the solution. 

If our solution does not support every step in the user's journey, they cannot meaningfully complete their task. Therefore they will abandon using it when they cannot continue any further. We could discover such shortcoming when we interview our users, but we would only discover the first hurdle. If our solution has more gaps, we would repeat the process a couple of times, wasting a lot of time. We can however accelerate the validation and discovery process if we focus on delivering 'wide' capabilities before we enhance their depth. 

Identifying feature saturation

We often forget that our job as product managers is to try to solve the customer problem with the least amount of effort possible. A simple solution that gets the job done trumps a very complicated solution that achieves the same result. Story mapping helps us visualize when we might be going to far by providing too many features to support a single step in the journey.

It is not to say that more features or more sophisticated features are not needed. A great example would be finding something to watch on Netflix. We can filter by genre, by title, by popularity, by 'something similar to what I watched before' etc. All different features supporting the same step. But more often than not there is a tendency to over-saturate the same step with too many features. While other steps are left unsupported.

Planning agile releases

Let's now dive into how to use story mapping for agile development.

Imagine you have understood and mapped out your target user's job to be done and steps required to accomplish it. You have brainstormed lots of different ideas and features and mapped them to corresponding steps. Now how should we use that picture to plan our agile development?

• Releasing all features all at once would be extremely wasteful. We don't necessarily know if we have to provide all those features, and it would take a lot of time to develop, test and deploy it all at once. 
• Releasing extremely sophisticated capabilities for one or few steps of the entire journey makes little sense either. It is like having a great steering wheel but no seats or an engine. Not enough for me to take your new car for a test drive.
• The first order of business is to provide a functional MVP (Minimal Viable Product). We can use story map to identify one story/feature for each step to ensure our users would be able to complete their job to be done with our solution (even if it isn't rich, beautiful or sophisticated). 
• We can then plan further releases by grouping remaining stories into obvious UX improvements and finally productivity enhancers or accelerators. However, gathering feedback from our users after the MVP release may either steers us in a new direction or prove to use that there is very little we need to do. 

It is extremely difficult to understand and appreciate waste and gaps in our development plan without visual aid.  From my experience, this 'breadth before depth' approach results in more holistic products that users resonate with. It ensures that our MVPs aren't just minimal, but also valuable.

What's next?

Story mapping was conceived and popularized by Jeff Patton. You can learn more about this technique and its applications in his famous book "User Story Mapping: Discover the Whole Story, Build the Right Product" from O'Reilly publishing.

However, story mapping is but one visualization technique and I would argue not the most powerful one. I will cover limitations of story mapping in my future blog, however over the years I've learned to incorporate and combine story mapping with several other approaches. This has led to creation of my own, syncretic approach called 'Total Story Visualization'.

If you would like to learn more, I would like to recommend my masterclass in Total Story Visualization: