Product Management 101: #9 User Story Mapping

User story mapping is a visual exercise that helps product managers and their development teams define the work that will create the most delightful user experience. It is used to improve teams’ understanding of their customers and to prioritize work.

User-story mapping (also known as user-story maps, story maps, and story mapping) is a lean UX-mapping method, often practiced by Agile teams, that uses sticky notes and sketches to outline the interactions that the team expects users to go through to complete their goals in a digital product.

Jeff Patton popularized the method, which replaces the lengthy, technical requirement gathering and siloed updating processes found in waterfall development. Story maps are intended to spark collaboration and conversation among Agile team members, while providing them with the bigger picture of how the digital product flows and fits together. This latter quality of story maps is important in the Agile environment, because losing sight of the product as a whole is a common challenge, likely to arise when teams work from a discrete list of user stories in a backlog.

A user-story map depicts 3 types of actions at different granularity: activities (the most general actions), steps, and details (the most specific actions). User activities and steps display horizontally across the top…