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

by Jeff Patton

I sat down with them and reminded them of something they already knew: “I understand that you’re different teams because you’re focusing on different areas, but it’s a major revision of one content management system. You’ll have to release together. You can’t plan a release until you can see it all together. You’ve got to visualize all these dependencies.” They agreed and quickly went to work reorganizing their individual backlogs into a map. Within a few hours they built a map on the wall using sticky notes that told the story of their content management system. I wasn’t in the room while team members worked together to build the map. But when I returned later in the day, I was amazed at how quickly they’d built it. They were pleased with themselves, and had every right to be. They’d made sense of several complex backlogs, organizing them into one coherent product story. And now each team could see where its work fit into the big picture.

Alianza could benefit from doing this with some of the large cross-team projects we are working on. Does everyone know what we are doing holistically?