User Story Mapping

Preface

Live in it, swim in it, laugh in it, love in it / Removes embarrassing stains from contour sheets, that’s right / And it entertains visiting relatives, it turns a sandwich into a banquet.

— Tom Waits, “Step Right Up”

This book was supposed to be a small thing…a pamphlet, really.

I set out to write about a simple practice I called story mapping. I, and lots of other folks, build simple maps to help us work together with others and to imagine the experience of using a product.

Story mapping keeps us focused on users and their experience, and the result is a better conversation, and ultimately a better product.

Building a map is dead simple. Working together with others, I’ll tell the story of a product, writing each big step the users take in the story on sticky notes in a left-to-right flow. Then, we’ll go back and talk about the details of each step, and write those details down on sticky notes and place them vertically under each step. The result is a simple grid-like structure that tells a story from left to right, and breaks it into details from top to bottom. It’s fun and fast. And those details make a better backlog of stories for our Agile development projects.

How complicated could writing a book about this be?

But it turns out that even the simple things can be pretty sophisticated. And writing about why you would want to build a story map, what’s going on when you build ...