User Story Mapping

5 minutes 5 Questions

User story mapping is a visual exercise that helps the Scrum teams to identify the work outcomes from the customer's perspective. It organizes user stories along two dimensions - the user's journey (vertical) and time or sequence (horizontal). This creates a shared understanding, context, and ordering of the work. It's an excellent tool for brainstorming, planning, tracking progress, and maintaining focus on user experience and value throughout the development process.

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.
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PSM I - User Story Mapping Example Questions

Test your knowledge of User Story Mapping

Question 1

During the Story Mapping session, your team is having trouble keeping conversations targeted and losing the overall direction. What should be the best approach to resolve this?

Correct Answer: Ensure the team constantly refers back to the goal and outcomes while discussing the tasks. Allow facilitation and use techniques to focus the team.

The best approach in a Story Mapping session where the team is losing focus would be to continuously refer back to the main goal and the expected outcomes while discussing the tasks. This helps to keep the team focused and aligned to the goal. Facilitation techniques could also be used to concentrate the discussions. The idea of ignoring the distractions and hoping the team self-corrects over time might not yield immediate results and can lead to inefficiency. Rescheduling the meeting, on the other hand, won't necessarily solve the issue if the behavior pattern persists in every session. Lastly, depending on a senior team member to guide the conversation, while not necessarily wrong, signifies a reliance on an individual which is contrary to the principles of Scrum which emphasizes self-organizing teams.

Question 2

During a User Story Mapping meeting, your team tends to focus on technical details, losing the big picture. What would be the best approach to handle this?

Correct Answer: Redirect the team's focus towards understanding the customer journey, emphasizing the importance of capturing high-level user needs before delving into technical specifics.

The primary goal of User Story Mapping is to gain a clear understanding of the customer journey and how the product features fit into this journey. It's important to focus on capturing the high-level needs and requirements through user stories before getting into the technical details. The correct answer emphasizes redirecting the team's focus to this end. The wrong answers, while related and plausible under different contexts, either mix objectives in a way that could dilute the focus of User Story Mapping or propose solutions that deviate from the method's intended purpose of highlighting user needs and the overall product journey.

Question 3

During the User Story Mapping session, the team is coming up with excessively complicated user stories. What can be done to counter this issue?

Correct Answer: Encourage the team to split these user stories into smaller, more manageable parts that provide value to the user.

The best way to handle excessively complicated user stories during a User Story Mapping session is to encourage the team to split these user stories into smaller, more manageable parts that provide value to the user. Breaking up larger tasks into smaller, digestible parts makes them easier to understand, manage, and complete. It also allows for better estimation of effort and time required per story and eventually results in a more efficient process. Discarding complicated user stories or removing complex functionality from the product backlog, as stated in other answers, does not solve the problem but rather avoids it, which could lead to missing out on important functionalities. Letting developers handle the splitting of user stories during the sprint, isn't efficient and might lead to confusion, misunderstanding, and misalignment amongst the team and other stakeholders regarding the agreed-upon functionalities and their implementation.

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Other Product Backlog Management concepts

Breaking Down EpicsDefinition of ReadyMinimum Viable Product (MVP)Product Backlog Item (PBI)Product Backlog PrioritizationProduct Backlog RefinementRefinement SessionsRelease PlanningSizing User Stories
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