6 tips for facilitation User story mapping workshop
4 min readJan 30, 2018
In previous post I wrote about How to prepare for User story mapping session — tips and tricks. Fortune favours the prepared - thorough preparation helps you to facilitate workshop in an efficient way, keep the people engaged and focused on the tasks to be done. Let's now move to the session itself. I was part of several User story mapping sessions either as
a facilitator or in a role of Product owner. Here comes my tips for making your session more efficient and valuable.
- Read loud the User story mapping guide. Before you start with crafting the personas, take the User story mapping guide, read it loudly in front of the audience and explain each step. Sounds a bit strange but believe me, it helps :) People feel more secure and confident, when they know what they are going to do. I usually have the shortcuts from the guide displayed in presentations, full deck in my hands, printed decks on table and one print always sticked on the wall.
- Draw a line on the floor. If your User story mapping session has more than 6 participants, it may (and believe it will) happen that there will be people shouting and arguing between each other, or some people just standing in front of the wall and staring. Draw a line on the floor and explain to all participants, that only active people can stay in front of the line. If someone would like to observe for some time, he can stay behind the line and once he would like to contribute or join again, he just crosses the line. It's not about splitting the people (not at all) but it's good to have some borders in order to define the “working area”.
- Don't let people sit. Even if they are behind the line and observing. Once someone sits, others will join and focus is gone. If you feel that people tend to sit or lean against wall, make a break (even if it's not in the agenda).
- Write tasks starting with verb. When you are in the part of creating the tasks, try to force people to write the tasks always with verb, e.g. Register via social media, Fill in the form, Show the examples, Submit the purchase, etc. It will help people to understand how users will interact with product and further user stories writing will be much more easier.
- Let people to talk and argue. User story mapping is not one man show where someone dictates others what will be the scope of work — complete other way around. User story mapping workshop is session where everyone can and should contribute. No matter if you are marketing representative or developer. Let people argue about added values, necessities, feasibility, etc. I only step in if the discussion turns into endless loop and goes nowhere. In this case I suggest to move on to next task, leave this behind for some time and come back to it later on.
- Test the User story map. You can quickly test your story map by asking any participant to tell the story of the product — everybody should be able to tell it with the User story map on the wall.
Do you have your own tips for the User story mapping session? Feel free to share it below in comments.
If you would like to know more about where you can use User story map, read my next post Scaling the User story mapping as a framework.
