User Story Mapping

Chapter 4. Plan to Finish on Time

This is Aaron and Mike. They work for a company called Workiva. Workiva makes a suite of products on a platform called Wdesk. It solves big problems for large companies, and it’s one of the biggest software-as-a-service companies you’ve likely never heard of.

Aaron and Mike look happy, don’t they? But that’s typical for people who’ve worked together to solve tough problems. Or could it be because the guy on the right has a beer in his hand? Nah, that’s not it. It’s that feeling from having solved a tough problem that’s making them happy. The beer is just a reward for solving the tough problem. If you don’t get beer, or an equivalent reward, for solving tough problems where you work, you should have a talk with someone about that.

Aaron and Mike have just completed several rounds of product discovery, and they’re confident they have something that should be built and go into production.

For them, discovery started with framing the feature idea they were working with to really understand who it was for and why they were building it. Then they talked directly to customers to validate their guesses about how they were working today and what the real problems were. After that, they built simple prototypes. For Aaron and Mike, they were able to build simple electronic prototypes in Axure and test them with customers remotely—first to see if they valued the ...