25 Tips For Better

Story Mapping

Handpicked hints from advanced Product Owners

 Copyright © 2018 DevMads Ltd.

All Rights Reserved. No part of this book may be

reproduced or used in any manner without written
permission of the copyright owner except for the use
of quotations in a book review.

Published by DevMads Ltd.

Table of Contents

Introduction............................. 4
Discover project goals............. 5
Map the journey....................... 10
Come up with solutions.............. 13
Prioritize user stories.......................... 21
Slice out the release structure..................... 26
StoriesOnBoard Features......................................... 29

Legend
Exercise

Related Article

Public Story Map

3
 Introduction
User story mapping is really easy to learn. By collecting user goals, steps,
and stories and arranging them into a logical order on a story map, you can get
a great overview of what’s needed from your product.

Even so, story mapping could deliver even more value if you develop your
knowledge to the next level. Our advanced story mappers invent amazing new
ways of working every day, and constantly improve the way they work. Based on
their expertise, we’ve made a collection of tips and ideas that’ll really ramp up
your story mapping comprehension. You’ve possibly already read our quick
guide User Story Mapping for Beginners, but for the benefit of those who
haven’t, here’s a top-level rundown of the process:

1. Discover the project goals

2. Map the journey
3. Come up with solutions
4. Organize tasks according to their priority
5. Slice out the release structure

To improve your whole story mapping process, we gathered together

best practices for each of these steps, so let’s dive right in. These techniques
work like Lego bricks, slotting together to build something solid. You’ll find that
most of them work well at the whiteboard, but to get the most value from story
mapping, we always recommend using an online tool. So we can demonstrate
our hints and tips more clearly to you, we’ve used in-app screenshots of
StoriesOnBoard.

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Discover the project goals
Framing the project, and creating clear goals is crucial for effective
planning. Project goals are the cornerstones of story mapping. If you write them
effectively, your job will be much easier during the next steps. If you miss a pro-
ject goal, you can easily miss other aspects of the story too, which leads to a
product that’s full of holes.

#1 Involve people in brainstorming

This looks like a cheap hint, but trust us, the more people you’ve got
involved in the creative stages, the better. The idea here is thought diversity,
and involving people from different teams adds new facets to your thinking.

For example, if you’re developing a webshop, a tech support team member

could deliver valuable information around requests.

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 You’d get priceless information from marketing or commercial departments too.
If you want to avoid a ‘too many cooks’ scenario, then organize silent
brainstorming or a Crazy 8 exercise.

Exercise
Let different people discuss the same everyday product
Discover product-related teammates at your company

#2 Choose the best-fitting brainstorming

method
As described above there are different brainstorming methods for
different needs. When a new project starts from scratch the best way is to invite
team members to a standard brainstorming and go thru the planning phases
step by step. First things first, the team should collect the user goals, then the
user steps and the user stories and so on...

As we mentioned in tip
1, if the brainstorming team
is too big, and descends into
chaos, then a silent
brainstorming session could
be effective. Create small
groups to discuss the ideas,
then place the results on the
board and remove
duplications.

What TEAM 2 sees

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 What the Product Owners sees

When your task is to improve a running product, there are two great
brainstorming methods. Reverse brainstorming is when you look closer at the
product features and try to find out which of them causes the biggest
satisfaction. This is easily tested by removing a feature and investigating the
dissatisfaction caused by this removal.

Reverse thinking is slightly different. This method gets you to ask the
question, “How would a typical user use our product?” Then imagine the
opposite outcome. Would it work? Why or why not?

Related Content
5 awesome brainstorming techniques to
boost planning
You can find many articles about well-known
brainstorming methods on the web, BUT we would like
to introduce five special methods for different
situations. Follow us to learn the new techniques.

Public Story Map

Silent Brainstorming Example

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 #3 Let your team catch up in story mapping

Although user story mapping is an easy-to-learn method maybe not every

team member is familiar with the process. It could be embarrassing to admit it,
and those members could participate effectively.

Remove barriers by starting a very simple story mapping session. Let the
people describe and map a very common activity of day-to-day life, e.g. the mor-
ning routine (by Jeff Patton). So they’ll be familiar with the method, and all of
them can add valuable thoughts.

#4 Use personas for better understanding

User personas are crucial elements of a backlog. They are similar to buyer
personas, used by marketing managers to understand the target market’s be-
havior and needs better. The target audience of a product can be segmented
by user groups according to their similar mindsets or goals. Each user persona
could represent a group acting similarly by using the product.

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 To engage your team and
keep them focused on users,
summarize the main goals and
add these cards to the board. To
express individual or common
goals, mark your top-level
cards with their related personas.
Using StoriesOnBoard you can easily assign personas to user goals.

Further possible persona preferences

Purchase behavior
Challenges/Pain points
Personal background
Business background

Related Content
What’s on a persona card?
You’ve probably heard about personas and if you
created a persona, would realize how hard it can be to
define them. Follow us in this short reading to get tips
where should you start.

5 formatting tips for personas

To create useful persona cards you have to fill the
details with valuable information. Read more about
what’s on a persona card here.

Public Story Map

Guide Map

Exercise
Categorize your product’s users according to their behaviour
Try to collect the key preferences of your user personas

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 Map the journey

#5 Continue to brainstorm

Don’t stop the brainstorming after you’ve found your goals. If the
brainstorming team is really engaged with the problem, they’ll be more likely to
be innovative in creating solutions.
Continue to brainstorm when you’re finding user
steps and user stories too. Using StoriesOnBoard
in brainstorming mode, you can collect ideas as
‘cards’ and decide later where to place them on
the map.

#6 Think in stories

Forget the features. Tell the story following the logical narrative flow! Tell
the story of a user, who goes through your product to reach his goal.

If you split this goal into subgoals then you will focus only on a chosen
subgoal. For example, if the main goal is to purchase a shirt on a webshop, then
the subgoals would be something like: narrow the search with filters, select the
color and size, use the checkout etc.

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#7 Retell the story

After you’ve built the narrative flow, ask a team member to retell the story
or retell another user persona’s activities on the product. This way you’ll estab-
lish missing steps.

It’s a really good idea to get team members to tell the story in the first
person. Telling a third person’s activity can create distance, so break down these
barriers by asking your participants to imagine themselves as a user. Using an
online story mapping tool means you can easily insert a new step between two
cards if you need to. Moreover, you can rearrange the whole narrative flow by
drag&drop (which is much faster than moving cards on the whiteboard!).

Exercise
Open Story Map Examples and try to find missing steps in the mapped
journeys

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 #8 Don’t consider UX to be an afterthought

Invite a UX designer to add a different and practical mindset to your team.

It could be helpful in those moments when your team doesn’t know exactly
what the real user journey looks like.

Ignoring users’ behavior at the beginning could cause additional work after
launch, and let’s face it, nobody wants that! Using StoriesOnBoard, you can
assign different colors to cards, or add tags to mark out several user journeys.

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Come up with solutions

#9 Write short card titles

After mapping the user journey, it’s time to collect your solutions or user
stories. To keep the good overview of the board, try to write expressive card
titles. A smart title helps you to recover the story quickly and easily. Avoid
abbreviations as they aren’t always clear to everyone. Write or attach every ot-
her piece of information to the back side of the card.

Online story mapping gives you the ability to attach unlimited details to a
user story, without complicating things. StoriesOnBoard limits the visible length
of card titles, to keep them short and sweet.

Exercise
Take time to learn how to write short card titles.
Create long descriptions and teach the team how to shorten them.

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 #10 Avoid cliches in your story writing

The good-old user story cliche “as a <user> I want <goal> so that...” could
be helpful when telling the story, but they aren’t always necessary when you’re
writing down the outcome. Standardized and repeating panels waste the card
title’s limited space and make the board hard to read.

When the team agrees to a user story, it’s good to summarize it in your own
words but remember to keep it short!

#11 Never miss the details

When brainstorming an idea, the team will tell you a lot more about the
user story than a card title. These valuable thoughts will be lost if you don’t write
them down. So try to make up a scheme for your user story details.

StoriesOnBoard’s markdown formatting allows you to create great looking

descriptions and lists with image attachment functionality.

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Write the user story, add an unordered list and even a picture or a sketch

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 Make up your own specification scheme. Separating categories by using different
headings gives nice looking card detail.

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#12 Evolve your information

The board is not just for the user stories, use it for notes and annotations
too. User story maps should be living and breathing backlogs.

Has a new idea or question come up after the brainstorming? Note and
save them for the next session or meeting to discuss. You can create new sto-
ries from these questions and ideas to make things tidy or separate your ideas
and questions cards out of the user stories by using different colors.

#13 Tag your user journeys

If you’ve run out of colors, you could use small tags in the card title to
group them or express different meanings. Essentially, you could perfectly
visualize your journey just with these tags. Don’t forget to explain which tag
belongs to which journey, so all teammates can easily understand it.

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 StoriesOnBoard has an awesome solution to visualize your journey called
the search&filter feature. It allows you to choose and filter a selected journey,
helping the team focus on a selected journey on the big story map.

Related Content
How to label user stories
Card colors are still a great feature to add more visu-
ality to a board, so use them for high priority informa-
tion such as task type, risk points. Afterward, try to add
icons to cards.

How to visualize personas and journeys

The next awesome opportunity to use labels is visuali-
zing buyer personas and journeys. In a user-centered
world, you can’t miss the buyer persona out of the
backlog.

#14 Test the story map

If the goals, the steps, and the user stories are consistent, every teammate
should be able to perfectly retell a selected journey. So, take the time to test the
backlog to discover missing steps or logical errors. Digital story mapping has the
ability to hide unrelated segments, so you can concentrate on the right part of
the backlog.

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#15 Slice user stories

Prioritizing user stories, or finding the best place on the map can be diffi-
cult. This is likely to be an issue when your user story is too big.
The solution is to split them into smaller stories.

For example, the ‘search box’ on an ecom site could be too big a user story
when it contains the basic and also extended search functions.

It’s called vertical slicing when you split stories by functional boundaries.
Avoid slicing horizontally by technical boundaries, because the outcomes are
not independent stories. Using StoriesOnBoard, you can use custom estimation
units. Estimations are summarized release by release. You can also filter your
‘too big’ user stories by using the search&filter panel.

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 #16 Choose a slicing strategy

All projects and user stories are different, but you will have to find the way
to split those ‘too big’ stories to avoid overwhelming your teams. If you struggle
with slicing user stories, try the following strategies:
- Split by user persona - if different user personas need different features
of a user story, then you could place the new stories under their related
personas.

- Split by data - test the user story to

find necessary data only. For example,
a registration form can ask for
multiple details like email address,
username, password, country of
residence, phone number, etc...but
the core function of registration can
work just with the email address and
password fields.

- Split by acceptance criteria - keep

out the edge cases and concentrate
on the most common usage. e.g. Type A users are the ones that pay with
their bank card, the most common journey. Prioritize the Type A journey
and avoid edge cases that might want to pay using an alternative, lesser
known method like loyalty points and trigger validation messages or
redirects.
After breaking a user story into two or more parts, some stories hold their
positions and some might move to further releases.

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Prioritize user stories
After collecting the user stories you should arrange them into a priority order.

#17 Use MoSCoW categories

There are several prioritization methods, one of the best known is the
MoSCoW method. It’s a very popular way to broadly prioritize the user
stories.

The team could easily agree with the four main priority classes (Must have,
Should have, Could have, Won’t have) and decide the stories’ priority. The ea-
siest way to approach the method is to create the four categories (as releases)
and move cards into the best-fitting category. You should keep these releases as
long as you work on the story map and you can create the final releases above
the MoSCoW categories.

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 #18 Continuously collect ideas

Ideas can come up at any time in the workstream and the team may not
always have time to discuss and prioritize them. That’s why you need to create
a space for new stories. You can place these cards into an “unprioritized ideas”
release.

Don’t hesitate to put a new thought there and organize meetings occasio-
nally (or regularly) to discuss new stories. This “queue-box” is not just for pro-
duct owners, all team members should be allowed to add their new ideas. Sha-
ring the map online allows the team to leave comments on these new ideas.

Related Content
How to handle emerging ideas effectively on
a Trello board
We’d like to give you an effective workflow template to
handle new tasks without disturbing a development’s
rhythm.

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#19 Remember that ideas are valuable

Never remove an idea. Put it into a “won’t have” or “icebox” release.

Recycle them and give them value.
- An idea may be valuable when the project’s scope is changing
- An idea could inspire teammates to think of a better suggestion
- An idea can show and prove previously tried “dead end” ideas

#20 Involve customers

Involving customers in product development is crucial to enhancing the
customer experience and delivering an outstanding product. Whether or not
customers took part in the planning stages, walking them through an overview
of the story map is a really good idea.

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 By introducing the anatomy of your story map to the consumer, everyone
involved gains a clear overview of the product and its benefits. Once users more
easily understand the goals and features of a story map, they can track product
development and discover missing or unnecessary features themselves.
Managing product design with a story mapping tool gives the product more
value to the customer, and since it is always available online, users can review
progress and leave feedback.

Managing a backlog in a story mapping tool allows the customer to track

current iterations through card statuses. Story maps keep your customers up-
to-date with the development process, which builds trust and transparency.

Related Content
Involving customers in product development
using story maps
Involving customers in product development is crucial
to enhancing the customer experience and delivering
an outstanding product.

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#21 Look beyond the MoSCoW method

One of the most frequent criticisms of the good old MoSCoW method is
that you have to set priority levels for every single user story. But how can you
declare relative priority on similar tasks? In fact, the issue is the same when you
use priority poker. There must be a different approach to scheduling tasks… We
suggest using goals. For example, A UX designer’s goals might look like this:

Level 1. Priority: “I got what I need”

Level 2. Priority: “Don’t make me think”
Level 3. Priority: “I really enjoy using it”
Level 4. Priority: Habit is second nature
Level 5. Make users of your promoters

Related Content
Learn to prioritize user stories from UX
designers
Projects are different, hence you should tailor plan-
ning and development processes right to the product.
Follow us and learn to prioritize user stories like a UX
designer.

#22 MVP - is the shortest/simplest way

Collecting all the user stories and journeys is the easy part… but how do
we find the most common, most relevant, most needed aspect of work to la-
unch the project? A product can target several buyer personas, so try to
concentrate on the biggest crowd, the most simple and common use case of
your product. Remember, the user has to complete the journey and reach their
goal. Collapse any non-relevant steps to get your MVP.

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 Slice out the release structure

#23 Come up with release goals

After slicing out the MVP, the next steps are not always clear. It could be
helpful to find or describe some further goals for each release.

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A goal can be:
- reaching another user persona
- upgrading an existing feature
- improving the user experience
- increase the rate of returning users

Once you’ve chosen your next goal, you can move any related cards into
this
release really quickly. In addition, there is a good opportunity here to rethink
your priorities and rearrange the releases. StoriesOnBoard offers enhanced re-
lease management with release date and goal filters.

#24 Mark user stories

As we wrote earlier, tags can be used for several reasons. Here are a few
examples of what you might use a tag for in development:

- Risky stories - sometimes, developing a feature can be risky. Special

knowledge may be needed or sensitive data could be involved.
- Possible barriers - a barrier could be for example, if your development
source is offshore and there are delays beyond your control.
- Priority work - i.e. a particular user story is a priority, but development
work is on hold as there is an awaited outcome from qual testing that’ll

Public Story Map

Accommodation Website - Visualize Personas
Accommodation Website - Visualize Journeys

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 #25 Use releases within scrums

Releases are developed to separate product versions, but they can be be-
neficial in scrums too. Think of it as separate iterations using release-lines. You
could even create scrum iterations inside a release. Using StoriesOnBoard, you
can track your iterations using status reports.

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StoriesOnBoard Features

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 Features for starting a new project from
scratch

Story Maps for an intuitive overview of the product vision

and roadmap

Create unlimited product plans on your workspace and organize them

into collections.

No matter how big your project is, there is endless space on the
story maps.

Set different teams and permissions on story maps.

Import previous backlog from Excel.

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 Story Cards for collecting all the details

Create intuitive card titles for easy understanding, improve

visuality with card title formatting, colors, and tags.

Use card details to give structured descriptions,

attachments, images, comments.

Use markdown formatting to write attractive descriptions.

Shortcuts for fast story writing and creating lets you build the
backlog faster than ever.

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 Personas for better understanding the project

Create user personas, add bio and avatar.

Assign personas to top-level cards on the story map to deliver the

maximum visuality.

Use custom labels and the search&filter to visualize user journeys.

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Features for easy backlog management

Easy navigation

Zoom in and out or collapse unrelated segments for a

better view.

Pin top-level card to see user stories in the context of the

product’s backbone.

Insert new cards between existing ones. Rearrange cards by

drag and drop.

Use search&filter to find updates in user stories made by

your teammates.

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 Product roadmap management

Organize user stories into releases and move cards between

releases by only a click.

Insert new releases between existing ones or move them

by drag&drop.

Add release details and release date.

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Estimate the project

Add estimations to user stories using custom estimation units.

StoriesOnBoard will calculate and track estimations release

by release.

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 Features for effective collaboration

Online collaboration

Share the backlog and manage online collaboration in real-time.

Work on the backlog at the same time or take the lead in

presenter mode.

Track members’ activities on the activity feed.

Filter out changed or new user stories by one click using

search&filter.

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Different projects, different teams

Set different permission levels on story maps depending on the

related project members.

Different visibility settings on projects.

Editors can add or edit user stories, attach files and comments.

Invite unlimited viewers for free for valuable thoughts and comments.

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 Integrate to project management tools

Connect your story map to JIRA, Trello, GitHub or Pivotal Tracker

by a few clicks to push tasks to the dev team.

User stories are synchronized in real time, status-changes can

be followed on the backlog.

Keep the pace by integrating your board with team chat tools
(Slack, HipChat etc).

Check integrations page

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