User Story Mapping: Discover the Whole Story, Build the Right Product

by Jeff Patton

Journey Mapping and Concept Generation Ben Crothers, Atlassian Given that we offer over 10 different products, we have to make sure that we design, build, and improve upon those products in ways that match how our customers use them together, not one by one. As part of a project to discover how the products could work together in a better way, we formed a multidisciplinary team to map the entire end-to-end customer experience in finding, evaluating, purchasing, and using them, as well as getting help and adding more products and services. This was huge. To help break it down, we mapped the experience at a high level first, and then broke into subgroups to expand on each section of that skeleton journey. We did this by initially filling a wall with the moments, actions, and questions that customers go through, color-coding as we went, and then going back over it, adding pain points, opportunities, and assumptions. We gained a lot of insight by being able to trace an end-to-end story rather than just a feature-based experience. We quickly realized, for example, that some parts of the experience—such as setting up products or getting help—weren’t isolated to one part of a linear journey, and needed to be catered for much more and in greater detail. Various other stakeholders and teams were brought in to flesh out more detailed journeys that were all pegged to various points along the high-level skeleton journey, so that we captured and validated as much existing knowledge as ...