User Story Mapping - helping Agile Product Owners manage their product backlogs

the task of building a roadmap for an initiative get a product a service or a change can oftentimes be a daunting one regardless of whether you are the product owner of the next big bet your organization is making or whether you're planning on redoing the living room in your house at the start of such initiatives we typically go through similar steps after the initial idea we get excited about all the possibilities oh i'm going to revolutionize the market's entire perception of this organization or maybe our living room will finally be worthy of architectural digest we

then proceed to a brainstorming and ideating phase where we try to capture all those ideas here we're high on endorphins as we let our creative juices flow unsure where to start however we then proceed to spend two to three months documenting all the ideas ambitions and goals we have in a massive document that unfortunately few will ever read next something like a creative hangover sets in and we feel overwhelmed by everything we want to do we are unsure how to proceed so we seek assurances from detailed plans and excessive analysis that create the illusion we

know what we have to do except after going through the monotony of long delivery cycles and continuously playing catch-up to the plan in reality the inevitable bomb explodes as the delivery date approaches nothing is working so then we push ourselves to the limit somehow deliver something and the ultimate result is did the users enjoy it did we achieve our goals stop it doesn't have to be like this there is a better way the approach being followed by many of the leading product organizations nowadays can be loosely described as agile product development while this is a

huge topic in itself we can highlight here some of the principles it builds on things such as focus on customer value as the driver iterative and incremental development continuous learning and improvement and constant prioritization such an approach values short delivery cycles that accelerate learning and value delivery now when using such an approach a very useful tool to help agile product owners do their job is called the user story map this technique was created by jeff patten and consists on re-imagining the one-dimensional product backlog traditionally product backlogs have one dimension priority the trouble is the reality

is not so simple we need context to prioritize effectively and a long list is not necessarily helping with that a user story map will display the product backlog in two dimensions priority and the journey of the user that second dimension enables us to see the backlog in a much clearer light by providing us with context we now have the full picture and we can start generating some insights and taking some decisions making the context clear also helps with prioritization now to build out that second dimension we step away from requirements for a second forget about

what you think you need to build put yourself in the user's shoes and think about their journey or narrative as they use your product normally you should map out first the main steps in the user journey let's call these activities secondly the user's narrative as they use the product or service so for each activity think about the different actions steps or decisions a user must take once you have this structure set up you can organize your backlog items first by finding in which narrative step they belong and then you can start prioritizing by doing so

while having a view of the user journey you can ensure that your prioritization enables you to deliver some value very quickly to your users with the user story map that same brainstorming output that overwhelmed us in the classic scenario we described previously can be much more easily organized our entire product backlog is visible within the context of the user journey and value delivery let's go through an example okay so the idea here is we're going to be trying to create our perfect morning routine meaning what would be all the things that you would like to

do before you leave the house to have to go to work so to build this exercise out and make it a little bit more interesting what we did is we asked people in the office to tell us hey what do you do before you leave the house to go to work what are all the activities or the things you have to do or that you would like to do in the morning and we got a lot of information a lot of different ideas suggestions or habits that people have so the first thing we're going to

do is collect all that information some kind of brainstorming session and put it all up here on the wall similarly to what you would do in a project when you're trying to think about the different features or capabilities that you would like to add to your product okay so let's get started let's take a look at what people are saying they do wake up that's one thing we definitely have to do in the morning ah i have to pick my clothes what clothes would i like to wear um i need to wash my hair take

a bath really a bath not a shower all right take a shower here you go there's another option we would have there i would like to do some gardening seriously somebody does gardening in the morning before they leave the house that's a joke right like who wrote this i must be doing something wrong all right gardening okay now if we take a look at everything we have over here on the wall it's quite daunting right this is a little bit how it feels like in the beginning of that cycle when you're trying to think and

build out that product or that service everybody has an idea and everybody says we should do all these things to make this product great and when you finish that brainstorming session and you look at this of course you're going to feel overwhelmed like look at all this stuff to do like where do i even start how do i organize this well if we're using a user story map the first thing we will try to do is after this initial brainstorm session maybe have a think about do we have some groupings over here do we have

some things that naturally belong together maybe we can start to form like some big groups okay so after we organize a little bit and we start to do some groupings we can start to identify that there may be like you know some high-level activities that we're doing if we start thinking about our morning routine well this is the big you know first there's like a big wake-up procedure which maybe i well let's be honest i snooze a couple of times um then i'll check my phone see if my partner is still sleeping and we can

group all that into the wake up activities and then there's stuff like you know once i leave the bedroom i might have to take a shower or brush my teeth or wake up the kids things like that i'm gonna have another group over here like i see like you know do some exercise or listen to some music prepare breakfast so you know the basic morning activities actually getting some stuff done and then over here in the end we have some stuff about like leaving the house right so i need to maybe check the traffic um

feed the cat take out the garbage that kind of stuff so we can start to put some titles here we can say well maybe this first activity we have over here we'll call it like wake up right and there's some activity some things we do under that wake up wake up activity then we have uh still in the bedroom so while i'm still in the bedroom maybe there's some other things that i'm gonna do and then i'm gonna have some morning activities right so things i'm doing during the morning part and then i have like

the big leaving the house so i can see here i have four like major groups of activities of what i'm doing during my morning routine of what we are doing during our morning routines okay this helps to start make a little bit more sense i feel a little bit less overwhelmed than i did when i saw just all those post-its all over the place but i still don't have enough information here like to start really deciding what do i want to do or what would i like to do or what don't i want to do

so maybe we need to go a step deeper and start pulling on that thread a little bit more and understanding okay what's the narrative here like what's actually my story when i'm getting up in the morning let's take a stab at that we start to understand a little bit better how things are working for example before we had identified these activities wake up still in the bedroom morning activities but now that we've structured things a little bit more down here we see that some of these don't perfectly fit anymore like so for wake up and

stay in the bedroom basically these two columns are both in that scenario right they're covering the scenario i just woke up where i'm still in the bedroom so we can probably only keep one of these and i'm going to keep my still in the bedroom activity so the first thing we have here is still in the bedroom then we have some general morning activities and those start somewhere over here in this column and we have things like you know showering and going to the toilet and doing some maybe facial grooming and then over here at

the end we have our leaving activity our big leaving activity that's leaving the house we need to check the traffic um drop the kids off at school um that kind of stuff okay so now we can start to think a little bit better about you know how do we define those little steps in the narrative on these columns we have identified over here so we can start off with okay first i'm still in bed right so this is things like you know i need to wake up maybe i hit the snooze button then i catch

my partner um they only have some stuff about getting out of bed okay this would be like putting on the pants opening the windows um then i'll call them here about personal hygiene where we have things like showering washing hair brushing my teeth um then now you see the structure we have here this would be a classic user story mapping structure and you see the structure of our morning routine now so all the different things we might do and in this structured in this narrative format so you have like time sort of a bit flowing

in that direction okay once we have this set up it becomes much much easier for us to start thinking about okay what now are the most important things to do what do i need to do first what can i take out of my morning routine if i want to sleep a little bit more and we can start thinking about those things so one of the things we can observe in the user story map is that horizontal lines across the story map represent an iteration an iteration is an experiment an attempt to accomplish something some people

like to call the first few iterations of a product their minimum viable product or mvp which is going to be a rough first attempt at delivering value now besides delivering value to users the other purpose of the iteration is to learn are the users happy are we on the right track can we improve and we also see that the priority dimension is correlated with time from a delivery perspective the further down the story map a backlog item is the later it will get delivered at the same time the backlog items that are part of an

iteration make up our increment that is what we actually deliver or accomplish during the iteration for banking mobile app that mvp could be the ability to check your balance for a marketing team working on a new campaign it could be the storyboard with their idea for the next tv advertisement now let's see how this would work in our example so let's take the example now from jeff patton where he talks about well imagine you have the most important meeting in your life and it just happens to be the same day that you miss your alarm

clock when you get up you look at your watch you have 15 minutes to get out of the house oh my god how are we going to do this well what you're going to have to do is to start prioritizing and you already see how this structure is going to help us prioritize because i can first start thinking about well in these steps in the narrative what are things are going to be more important or not and within those steps what are the tasks i have to do that maybe i can prioritize up or move

down and skip altogether so if we start playing that game and start trying to move down everything we don't really need to do and try to come up with like okay what's the 15 minute morning routine the morning routine where i miss my alarm clock i have to get out of the house in 15 minutes how could i do it well let's take a look okay so you can see what we have here now is we have sort of a prioritized set of minimum tasks that we need to do before we can get out of

the house so we can make it in 15 minutes and still make it to that important meeting so what do i have here well i need to wake up personal hygiene yeah you see a lot of stuff is getting sacrificed over here we still have time at least to put some mouthwash so at least we don't have bad breath when we go to work go to the toilets i wish we could delay that but you gotta go you gotta go facial grooming that's completely scoped clothes just get dressed whatever clothes you can put on don't

worry about picking clothes or making them look too nice just grab the first decent looking thing you have and put that on okay fitness that's getting de-prioritized for sure no food no coffee we can grab a coffee once we get to the office all those nice tasks we do at home before we leave like take out the garbage um or check my phone check my work calendar plan my day all that kind of stuff gone don't have time for that and just go to work now if i look here there are quite a few gaps

right and one of the things that got the prioritized was the whole thing of waking up the kids driving them to school preparing their lunch blocks all this kind of stuff so i need to create a new task over here because this has to be delegated she might not be happy but it's a solution i can just say hey sorry i'm late i really really really need to go so the only task i'm doing today is i'm going to tell my partner sorry today you got the kids in the morning i have to run let

me see all the stuff that we move down over here and we have just the minimum set of tasks up here that's what we would call like our first release maybe our minimum viable product for our perfect morning routine like at least this we need to do to be able to get out of the house okay so we can go ahead and highlight this maybe if i say okay that'll be the 15 minute routine to get out of the house and that's the first experiment we can do and we can start with that and from

that experiment we can start to learn is that enough did people complain i was smelling badly at work because i didn't take a shower what about my teeth like long-term sustainability of my teeth every day i'm just using mouthwash and i'm brushing my teeth maybe i'm going to have a problem there what about my partner i can't just every day tell my partner hey you got the kids good luck see you at some point in time i also have to help out around the house and the garbage and all those other things so but it's

okay this is our first experiment at the morning routine and we can see how it goes okay we can learn from that that's very important so once we do that then we can start thinking okay what would we like to add to this morning to make it a little bit better right all right so let's take a look at what this second round of prioritization looked like right as we're trying to improve our morning routine or create our perfect morning routine so one of the things is that we're adding here is wake up the kids

okay so i can't just tell my partner hey you do everything so i'll go and wake up the kids also we're going to do something about personal hygiene right that experiment of not taking a shower not brushing my teeth a little risky so we're adding a shower and brushing my teeth uh to our morning routine uh facial grooming still out of scope not doing that right now for the clothes we'd like to look a little bit better at work so at least let's make sure that our shirts and our pants match that we're not wearing

the same thing we did yesterday right so we're gonna be picking some clothes fitness still nuts priority enough for foods okay we're not gonna be having a fancy breakfast but at least i'm gonna prepare some coffee and put on the radio so i can listen to some news in the background okay and for the getting to work part there's one more thing i've added there's okay i'll drop off the kids at school also so at least i can start to share the load with my partner my partner is still going to be doing a lot

with the kids right because all i'm doing is waking them up and dropping them off at school but at least we start to share the load and we can say okay this is our second experiment with the perfect morning routine let's try this and see how it goes let's try to figure out like how long does this take actually maybe this is taking an extra 20 minutes okay so now i have to get up 35 minutes before i have to leave the house so this is maybe an extra 20 minutes and allowing us to do

a little bit more things and i can keep going with that same process and okay what would i like to add on next and you start to see those dynamics that are so important for product development or product prioritization right when we're trying to plan all the things we need to build for our products for example it would be nice to do all these things that are here like i would love it if every morning i could stretch meditate do some yoga gardening read the newspaper spend time with my kids but at the same time

i don't want to get up at four o'clock in the morning right that's just not going to work for me so you need to make some trade-offs and you need to start learning to see okay what do i really like in the morning what's really enjoyable the theory of gardening might be really really nice but when i actually have to get on and put my gardening gloves and go outside and maybe the weather is not the best and maybe it's just making me miserable right so one of the things we start to see is we

start to do these experiments these iterations that these lines represent here we build something of value a minimum morning routine and then we try it out that experiment of trying it out enables us to learn something and that learning we can now inject into the next experiment okay how does that affect my priorities and this structure then is showing me two things it's showing me the experience i'm gonna have in my morning what are the different things that i'm gonna be doing what am i not going to be doing in my morning but it's also

telling me the importance of things things here at the top are very important i have to do these things before i get out of the house no choice things here at the bottom maybe are not so important if i have time if i can go to work later today or if for whatever reason i'm up at six o'clock in the morning great then i have some additional time that i can do these things but it gives me a clear understanding of what's the most important thing for my morning routine and the other thing to keep

in mind is every line we have here every horizontal slice we're taking of this user story map is an experiment we're doing it means we're delivering some value to our users or to our morning routine and we're learning from that another thing we can see come up are alternatives to accomplish a specific task in our morning routine example i had alternatives on how to clean myself i could take a shower or a bath i chose shower because it's quicker but i could later decide to switch that to a bath thinking about alternative ways to accomplish

a task gives product owners options enabling them to save time on things that need to be there but are maybe not the core of the value delivered finally the user story map can also help in identifying gaps areas that we are currently not focusing on this might be for a good reason or it might be because we forgot about it in either scenario the user story map helps us see these gaps one of the reasons this tool has become so popular with agile teams is also that it is incredibly flexible take for example a non-product

team which is what i would call a team that doesn't have one clear user product or service they are focusing on imagine for example an hr team they might be involved in a couple of projects while they also must handle some generic admin tasks offer support to line managers and so forth such a team can't really build one user journey but they can still benefit from a two-dimensional product backlog they will simply use the horizontal dimension to represent the different intake channels for work that way they can prioritize the incoming work per channel first and

then across channels to generate their prioritized product backlog a good reference for further reading on this topic is the book written by jeff patten himself that is creatively titled user story mapping in the meantime try using the user story mapping tool with your team and start practicing those agile product ownership instincts of understanding context prioritizing and delivering value