User Story Mapping | Product Backlog Creation
Assumption - We have good understanding of What is "User Story" in Agile world. If you are new, Please refer to MY BLOG:Backlogs normally is pretty confusing if it is not managed periodically. They typically start off with a high-level list of features, which we call “epics” that make sense to everyone involved. However, as we start decomposing all the way down to sprintable stories soon everyone will be lost and the only person with the decoder ring is the Product Owner. They are the only one who knows how all the sub stories tie back up and relate with each other. But how do we make sure we get the right MVP?
What is Story Map / What can be achieved?
- Story Maps were invented by Jeff Patton to help discover requirements from a user experience point of view.
- Story Maps represent a roughly linear view of the steps a customer follows as he or she interacts with the product.
- Story Maps helps to identified all question shown in image.
Creating The Story Map
Let’s take any e-commerce site as an example. So in order to buy Song, as a user, I will have following user journey…
These steps usually equate to Epics in the product backlog and each step gets broken down into smaller tasks, which often become User Stories.
- Once we’ve got the activities identified we will order them in the chronological order of how a user will interact with the product (I have already ordered them)
- It is common to rearrange existing activities or add new activities as the discussion unfolds. This is a key benefit of the collaborative approach to building the product backlog as we have the shared wisdom of an entire team involved in the discussion.
Stories
Below each activity , we create user stories which flesh out the customer journey. These stories are ordered by value to the user. Value may be identified through conversations with users, analytics on usage patterns, or another form of insight appropriate for your product. For example,
Test for gaps
Next, I will look for missing tasks for my map. I will do this by having someone walk through another scenario or from a different perspective (I.e. Different user persona). This will allow us to flesh out any missing pieces.
Prioritize
Once the team has the backbone and stories ordered it is time to sequence the work. What do we want to deliver in our MVP, our 1.0, 2.0, etc.
- Now that we have the map prioritized we can outline iterations or releases of our map. We can draw a line for Release 1.
- We can order within an activity and we can also create different swim lanes across the story map for different levels of priority MoSCoW (ex: Must, Should, Could, Would)
- By grouping user stories by feature, the story map makes sure that we create meaningful releases which allow users to complete end-to-end journeys. It helps us build a first release that’s a minimum viable product and then iterate on it, bringing new value to the business and the user with each new release.
Conclusion:
Story mapping is an effective inception tool to create a product backlog in a visually structured way. It helps in building a shared understanding, identify gaps in the backlog, see inter-dependencies, perform better relative sizing.
