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

by Jeff Patton

To make the map easier to grasp, we use color-coded stickies for activities and user stories related to an individual persona or role,

while the team is creating the map, additional aspects come up, such as “white spots” where the team needs to do more research, or open questions, dependencies, or gaps.

We can both read the same document, but have a different understanding of it.

The best solutions come from collaboration between the people with the problems to solve and the people who can solve them.

stop working so hard on writing the perfect document, and to get together to tell stories.

Stories get their name from how they’re supposed to be used, not from what you’re trying to write down.

If we get together and talk about the problem we’re solving with software, who’ll use it, and why, then together we can arrive at a solution, and build shared understanding along the way.

If you can tell stories about what the software does and generate interest and vision in the listener’s mind, then why not tell stories before the software does it?

So the idea is telling, and you know you’re doing it right if you’re generating energy, interest, and vision in the listener’s mind.

If you’re not getting together to have rich discussions about your stories, then you’re not really using stories.

Card Write what you’d like to see in the software on a bunch of index cards.

Conversation Get together and have a rich conversation about what software to build.

Confirmation Together agree on how you’ll confirm that th...

simple isn’t easy.

Because it’s hard to explain things perfectly, and because it’s easy to imagine different things based on our past experience, the listener likely imagined something different than you.

Because this is a conversation, the listener can ask questions and it’s the back and forth that will correct that understanding and help everyone arrive at some shared understanding.

Story conversations are about working together to arrive at a best solution to a problem we both understand.

If we build what we agree to, what will we check to see that we’re done?

When it comes time to demonstrate this later at a product review, how will we do that?