Capture the story, then the tasks.
Trello, JIRA, Pivotal Tracker — and others — all serve to make building and development more methodical and productive. These tools are indispensable to any development team and there’s nothing wrong with them. Well, maybe one thing: the story.
The lack of story-capture isn’t a shortcoming of these tools, per-se, but rather a function of task-management itself. A bunch of tasks, maybe some epics, give no sense of story. There’s no big picture. I’ve seen apps built like this. They tend to feel “duct taped”.
To help make this clearer, let’s draw a distinction between the creative aspect of tasks and the management aspect.
When you’re taking a new idea and bringing it down from ephemeral-idea to material-execution, your idea — your story — is the handsome prince(ss), and the task-model is its army of servants. There’s still the king of course, but his concern is the treasury — the economics. Let’s leave the king aside for now.
Task managers like Trello, Jira and Pivotal help the task-model — the task model — stay clean, pruned, tracked, discussed, changed. These wonderful tools do not serve the idea. In fact, they can very quickly become an idea-graveyard if you’re not careful.
Fear not though, there’s a better way! Physical card mapping.
Above is a picture of me 9-years ago with my first story map, or task model. In short, a story map combines a broad view, in most cases a chronology, and a “crude” arrangement of high-level tasks.
Task managers are the enemies of the narrative.
Now compare this to JIRA or Trello or Pivotal Tracker. There’s no easy way to capture — to create — a big picture, a compelling story with a limited-sized glowing computer or device display. Trying to do so may be strangely appealing but it’ll poison the authenticity — possibly the very existence — of your story, your idea.
After you’ve got your model, then it’s time to capture it and manage it using your favorite task management tool. <enter JIRA>
Oh, and if you’re really serious, you’ll read Jeff Patton’s User Story Mapping. I have no idea how anyone can live without this book.
