Story map

To create a story map

1. Identify user types and roles and their goals, needs, desires, gains, and pains
2. Solicit scenarios and stories—a day in the life of…
3. Distill story titles, validate with users and goals
4. Map out in story map

• Reemphasize the Business Vision and its expected outcome (from the PID?)
• Reiterate the Product Vision, Measurable Product Goals and output
  • Unique value of initiative
• Establish either (in the column headings of the story map):
  • a basic workflow or flow of activities
  • Epics
  • Key activities
  • major components
• Feature Thinning Guidlelines (Jeff Patton)
  • Make the top most row the first, smallest release.
  • Minimize a release so that to reap financial and risk reduction benefits earlier.
  • Top slice represents the minimal tasks needed to reach the Measurable Product Goals.
  • How can you split the stories into its smallest parts?
    • Can the features to support the task have
      • reduced safety?
      • reduced comfort?
      • reduced luxury?
      • options slated for a later release?
  • Which steps in the tasks are optional for now?

Story Map Roadmap

Give each slice of your story map a distinct name that hints its major focus and value. For example, if you are building a city for the graying population, you may consider the following slices (and releases):

1. Basic City
2. Safe City
3. Green City
4. Bingo City

Another roadmap example from Sensei, a tool that facilitates fun, effective retrospectives for distributed agile teams.

1. Guided Retrospective (MVP)
   • Benefit: A guided retrospecive that tracks improvement & works for remote teams too.
   • Features:
     • Moderate retros locally or remotely
     • Facilitates and tracks retros
     • Plan and review actions and their results
2. Retrospective Customization
   • Benefit: Make and share your own retros
   • Features:
     • More built-in retro flows & visualizations
     • Customizable questions and flow
     • Tips for moderators
3. Progress Tracking
   • Benefit: Powerful & beautiful improvement visualization & reporting
   • Features:
     • Visualize Sprint Rating, Happiness Index, Action Results, Customer Satisfaction & more
     • Custom metrics
     • Track and trend multidimensional improvement

Yet another example of a theme park overhauling their in-park app:

1. Smooth & Silk
   • Benefit: Snappy, fluent, and elegant beautiful experience.
   • Features:
     • State of the art user experience and graphics
     • Actual and accurate information (directly from Sitecore CMS).
     • POIs show basic daily stats.
2. Full Day Thrill
   • Benefit: Get the most out of your day at the park by minimizing waiting and travel time
   • Features:
     • Clear visual waiting times
     • Discovery of hidden park pearls
     • Overview of show times—never miss a show
3. Zero Waiting Times
   • Benefit: Never spend more than five minutes in a queue
   • Features:
     • Plan your park trip in advance
     • Change your trip at any moment
     • Go to the front of the line with priority access on your next ride

Sources

• product owner » Martien van Steenbergen's slide deck.
• Agile Product Design » Jeff Patton » The new user story backlog is a map.
• Agile Product Design » Jeff Patton » User Story Mapping » Quick Reference Guide.
• Winnipeg Agilist » Steve Rogalsky » How to create a User Story Map.
• InfoQ » Ben Linders » Product Backlogs with Process Maps or Story Maps.
• Eriksen Costa » Mapping your domain knowledge