Story Mapping is a method of understanding a Product Backlog by understanding the relationships between Stories as a visual map.

Using Story Mapping for a whole product is a great approach for teams embarking on a new product, a project, or a significant upgrade to an existing product, the extent of which is clearly defined and well understood. Understand that this approach is going to be less useful for teams who are maintaining an existing product. What those teams can do, however, is build a story map for a new feature.

The whole thing is built around a pretty simple idea.

1. Along the top of your story map is the high level narrative of your product, broken into core elements.
2. Cascading down from those core elements are the details that make your narrative meaningful, organised in descending order of importance.
3. We build those details from the top down, in order to fulfil the high level narrative.

The horizontal axis of your Story Map is the order in which we understand the way a user typically uses your product. What is important here is not accurately capturing the exact order of a user's actions. It is more important that the order captures, from left to right, the order in which we explain the function of the software.

The vertical axis has two parts: above the line and below the line. We'll come back to "above the line". Below the line, the vertical axis captures the order in which we will incrementally deliver the product. Key business value at the top, less important detail at the bottom.

Now we'll come back to "above the line".

In the very top row of the map, we have our Activities. The high level "things" that a user does when they interact with the software.

The next row breaks down Activities into a slightly more granular level of detail. Jeff Patton calls these Tasks.

Then we'll draw a thick black line below the Tasks.

Below the line, each Task we'll break down into the relevant details as a column directly underneath the task. If you like, you can call these Stories.

Then we'll draw more horizontal lines across our map. Each line delineates a release. Above the first line, we have the most important Stories. That's our first release.

References

Story Mapping as I understand it, I learned from Jeff Patton's book and articles. Read the articles first for a high level understanding of the key concepts, then grab the book in dead tree or kindle format.

• Jeff Patton, User Story Mapping: Discover the Whole Story, Build the Right Product (book)
• Jeff Patton, Story Map Concepts cheat sheet (PDF)
• Jeff Patton, "The New User Story Backlog is a Map article
• Jeff Patton, "How you Slice It", article, PDF
• Jeff Patton, "Story Mapping: Don't Lose the Big Picture, video, youtube.

Further Reading

If you enjoyed this topic, here's a few other things you might be interested in reading about.

• Roger L. Martin, "The Big Lie of Strategic Planning", Harvard Business Review, article.