How user story mapping can be useful in agile software development

What is user story mapping ?

User story mapping is one of the best possible options in the world of Agile to organize the the required features of a product mainly in software development from the perspective of your customers or users. It is a simplified way of defining things that your user can do (known as user stories) within the context of your core user journeys.

In other words, it would be a mapping out of user stories where in the product team would be portraying the story of the customer journey and break it into parts and chunks. This helps them design and build functionality that is focused on desired customer outcomes, instead of solely on development output or feature specifications.

"User story mapping can be used whenever you need to make sense of your product’s future while keeping its present state front and center"

How clear are we about user story ?

User story mapping is built upon the concept of User stories which is focused at communicating requirements from the user's perspective. Teams or the product owners should write user stories in a format that captures certain focused business requirements which could be completed within a particular development iteration (usually called as sprint in Scrum Framework) and if there are any such requirements which would require efforts that could surpass a particular sprint, such requirements would be categorized as an Epic.

The 3C's of a user story

We can follow the concept of 3C's in order to build up the components of a well structured user story so that the room for confusion during the process is reduced.

The user story format

As a [type of user], I want to [action] so that [benefit].

We can always start writing a user story with this basic format (Cards in 3C's) and the detail components could be added up at a latter point upon the continuous discussions (Conversation in 3C's).

“Focus on the breadth of the story before diving into the depth … Go a mile wide and an inch deep?”— Jeff Patton

Why should you adopt user story mapping in an agile project ?

There are considerable benefits from combining user stories with user story maps to gather, manage and plan requirements across software releases.

Following are few such key benefits of user story mapping.

1. Identification of critical requirements for a MVP (Minimum viable product) Release

Building a holistic visualization of all the work that would be required to deliver a fully fledged product can help the project team decide on what is critical for a product to run smoothly, organize work into releases and de-prioritize/ work that has less user value. Hence, With a story map, teams can prioritize the most important features first and deliver code, based on the prioritized small slices.

2. Breaking down of larger requirements into smaller chunks

If the business requirement is too complex to be stated on a single user story, we could simply break it up into small chunks of user stories. User story mapping will provide the luxury of organizing requirements into groups and then deliver in smaller releases.

3. Enhances customer communication and business relationship

User story mapping would result in improved communication and coordination with the customer. Since, each requirement is aligned to the product journey, process steps and the releases, the customer would be in a better position to understand which feature will be released when. Also, if the customer requests a different user story to be prioritized, the customer can simply re-prioritize that feature using the story maps. This would definitely improve the efficiency and facilitate the sprint planning process as well.

4. Better visualization of system or product road map

let's assume that you are the developer and the business analyst of your project handed over a 150 page business requirement document with a list of user stories and asked you to approve and proceed with design and development. Do you think it would be effective ? There would always be a chance that you would miss a critical requirement that is required for a MVP release. This process is mainly adhered in most of the waterfall and also in agile projects and the perception is that this does not make any sense because it is difficult to explain how requirements align to a system journey with a massive requirement document put in place.

However, in the case of user story mapping, the focus is smaller and clearer. As a result,the customer can visually understand the requirements being delivered in the first release, second release and subsequent releases. Once these requirements are implemented as a working software, the customer and the project team will have a better idea of how to adjust the product or system road map.

Who should participate in user story mapping?

User story mapping is a collaborative exercise that helps align cross-functional teams around building a usable product to the end customer/user.

Typically, you’ll want 4-8 people from a few different groups:

How does user story mapping work?

User story components

Story maps as described by Jeff Patton includes certain key structural elements as stated below in the image. Having an understanding on this would help you to have better insights in terms of the user story mapping steps.

Steps to create a user story map

To be much clearer, let's consider the requirement of an email service development project and discuss the above steps in much more detail.

1. Frame the Problem

What is the problem your product solves for customers, or what job does it help them do?Taking a goal-first approach is critical in mapping the work that follows, and teams need to ensure they are mapping the customer’s goal.

2. Understand the product users

Next step would be to identify the target audience of the system and the nature is such that there will be definitely more than one user. Different audiences can have different goals and ways of interacting with the system. Starting this exercise with a set of user personas can ensure that teams share an understanding of the target audience and build stories from that point of view. As an example, Email service admin and Email user could be identified as the product users.

3. Map user activities

All users who interact with a product will likely do so through a series of common activities. These activities — also referred to as themes or functions — form the backbone of the user story map. For example, the user of the email service product may want to search mail, file mail, create mail, and read mails. These activities will comprise the stories across the top of the map, which the team will then break down into smaller user stories.

4. Map user stories under activities

With the backbone in place and major themes defined, the team can now build out the skeleton of the map by breaking down each activity or theme into smaller user stories. For example, under the file email activity, there could be a story like, “As an email user, I want to move mails so that I can classify mails into various sub folders.”

5. Flow and prioritize

With the high-level themes and detailed user stories in place, the next step would be to prioritize stories, ranking them vertically so that the most important ones are at the top. Then, teams can map how users flow through the product typically from left to right in a chronological order. If a product has multiple types of users, teams may want to map different scenarios for each. These actions help teams decide which stories are vital and which ones are less important to delivering a delightful product experience to the target audience(s).

6. Plan sprints and releases

This is where teams can turn a visual exercise into executable work. With stories prioritized from the top down, teams can see the work that will deliver the most value in the shortest time and group these stories into development sprints and product releases. Teams will create horizontal “slices” across the map, grouping stories by priority within each critical user activity.

Considering the above steps the user story map for the email service development project can be visualized in the below manner.

Online tools to develop user story mapping

There are various online tools available out there where you can develop visual user story mapping for your respective projects quickly and efficiently. Below tools also have integrations in place with JIRA, Azure DevOps, Team Foundation Server and other project management tools.

Further reading about User story mapping: