What is Total Story Visualization technique for business analysis?

As a product manager and a business analyst I have struggled for many years with juggling different concepts, techniques and methodologies relevant to my job 😫 Let’s just list a couple of concepts that always come up in context of designing digital solutions:

•  Jobs to be done
•  User journeys
•  User experience design
•  Automation logic / algorithms
•  System architecture
•  User stories
•  Minimal Viable Products

I probably missed a few 😅...  A truly great business analyst or product manager would know and think about all of those things. But constantly ‘context’ switching can be tiring. Especially if we need to navigate from one document or canvas to the next and back.

Assuming that you even manage to context-switch like that (which in my experience very few professionals do), another challenge is the notation. Jobs to be done and personas? Probably need some sort of visual template to fill out. User journey? A power-point-esque matrix of columns and rows. Capturing user stories and planning Minimal Viable Products? Story mapping (sticky notes).

Total Story Visualisation is an analysis technique I devised to address those challenges. It is a comprehensive, hierarchical diagramming method that integrates Universal Process Notation, Jobs to be Done, User flow, and System flow diagrams to provide an in-depth view of user experiences and product interactions. This then helps to design better user stories and Minimal Viable Products.

How does Total Story Visualization work? 

The foundation of TSV is the Universal Process Notation as it is the simplest process mapping methodology which also incorporates hierarchical diagramming. While classical UPN is agnostic about what to capture at each diagram level, within TSV each diagram level is meant to represent a specific type of content:

•  Jobs to be Done Lifecycle: the high-level diagram that captures the general categories of jobs to be done your users face and how they relate to each other.
•  Context-specific jobs to be done: Jobs to be done are not mere goals or statements. They are contextual. You can have the same type of activity being performed in completely different contexts which affects what is required to execute them.
•  Job Maps: Every job to be done has a structure and a process people need to go through to accomplish it. At this level you are meant to capture the solution-agnostic job map to understand what is really required.
•  User Experience: Once you truly understand the contextual job map, you can start designing the user experience to support it.
•  Automation Diagrams: Once you capture your user experience, you can easily capture automation logic and how it supports that user experience.

Why does it work?

1. Holistic Understanding: Traditional analysis techniques often suffer from tunnel vision, focusing on isolated aspects of a problem. TSV's multi-level approach provides a holistic view and allows you to take a logical journey from the user's specific problem down to intricate details of your solution. Rather than dealing with several separate views, in TSV each frame of thinking is captured in context of the one above. 

2. Problem-Solution distinction: In Total Story Visualization there is a clear distinction between understanding the problem and designing the solution. Jobs to be done lifecycle, jobs to be done and job maps all form the 'problem space'. Only once you truly understand the problem space you can drill down and start designing the user experience to support them. 

3. Reduced Complexity: The more complex a solution, the greater the risk of failure. Multi-level abstraction acts as a 'complexity sieve,' filtering out unnecessary details at each level and retaining only the most crucial elements. This leads to simplified yet more effective solution designs.

4. Accelerated Innovation: When you can see the entire story, it becomes easier to identify gaps, redundancies, or opportunities for automation and innovation. TSV inherently fosters a culture of continuous improvement and agility.

How does Total Story Visualization help in solution design?

TSV is in some ways an expansion of the original Story mapping technique devised by Jeff Patton. Just like in story mapping, you are advised to capture the steps needed to perform the job (job diagram). But whilst in story mapping you would capture your feature ideas in a form of a sticky note board, in TSV you are advised to capture the actual, step-by-step user experience journey as a diagram. Thanks to unique notation of UPN, the diagram visually looks like a connected flow of user stories.

Hence why you do not capture user stories from the user journey diagram, the diagram IS your collection of user stories. That allows your development team to look at all tickets in context and appreciate the entire story and how each piece of work fits into the larger narrative. It also helps you in your design and analysis because any gaps in user experience become much easier to spot and address.

What's next?

While Total Story Visualization is a powerful and logical technique, it does require some training and getting used to. First, you need to become familiar with UPN diagramming notation. Within TSV there is also a very specific approach to understanding and capturing jobs to be done.

You can learn the entire framework with practical examples to hone your skill and understanding in my masterclass in Total Story Visualization: