Guide to User Story Mapping

User Story Mapping is a critical aspect of product backlog management, particularly vital for understanding the user's journey and ensuring product functionality aligns with user needs.

Why it's important:
User Story Mapping provides an overarching view of the user experience, enabling the team to prioritize tasks coherently. It promotes collaboration, driving shared understanding level about the product's functionality among team members.

What it is:
User Story Mapping is a visual representation of user stories and their interrelationships, typically arranged from top to bottom in order of priority and left to right to represent the user's journey. The stories on the top are more general user activities, while the tasks underneath each top-level story are more specific user tasks.

How it works:
A user story map is created with the entire team, including the product owner and stakeholders. The process involves identifying user roles, outlining the user's journey, filling the storyboard with user stories and assigning priorities based on business value.

Exam Tips: Answering Questions on User Story Mapping:
1. Understand the structure of a user story map, be able to explain it and differentiate between higher-level user activities and detailed user tasks.
2. Be prepared to justify the value of this practice by explaining how it aids task prioritization and team understanding of the product.
3. Be able to apply the concept in a given scenario – remember that the user’s journey is sequential and story prioritization is vertical.
4. Remember that the creation of the user story map is a collaborative process involving the whole team.
5. Understand the relationship of User Story Mapping to Product Backlog Management – it is a part of the process of managing and prioritizing the backlog.
6. Feel comfortable with the vocabulary associated with User Story Mapping and use the correct terminology in your answers.