User Stories, Fables, Tales, and Chronicles
“No saga will ever glorify their deeds, no epic make them immortal.”
Extract from: The Trail of '98 by Robert W. Service
Do you want to create products that wow your users?
You may have heard of user story mapping. Simply put, user story mapping is an exercise that entails creating requirements – stories – from users’ perspectives and then placing them along a scale that enables prioritization.
Often, teams dive in and flesh out details of the requirements. A commonly used technique is to use the format:
As a <User>, I want to <Need/What> so that <Reason/Why>.
After writing out stories in the above format, the team members place stories in a product backlog along a sliding scale that enables prioritization by the product owner.
Simple, right?
This might sound good, however some critical things that are missing include:
Are these the right stories?
Do they really portray the way the system would or should be used?
How do the stories align with the organization’s objectives?
What order should the stories be developed in?
When can something be released to production?
When will we be done?
Clearly, we need to do more. Advanced user story mapping allows us to answer the above questions and to meet the goals below:
Creating a shared understanding
Assigning business value
Sizing effort
Prioritization of features
Creating a release plan
The steps below allow us to answer the missing questions and meet the points above:
Start by defining a need (product) that fulfils the organization’s vision
Determine the actors involved in the use of the product e.g., a buyer, a seller, an administrator, registered vs. guest user, etc.
Create activities (epics) along a high-level journey from the users’ point of view
Brainstorm and create features under each activity. Features in their totality complete that activity
Sort the features in order of criticality (i.e. most critical at the top)
Capture the workflow from left to right ordered by the workflow sequence
For each feature, create user stories. Build horizontally – think inch deep, mile wide
Iterate and add more user stories
Mark business value on each user story (H/M/L for High, Medium, or Low)
Ask the team to estimate effort for each user story. Let the team select the scale they use. Commonly used ones include the Fibonacci sequence and T-shirt sizes (XS, S, M, L, XL)
Discuss and assign business priority on each story. There are many prioritization techniques. A common one is MoSCoW – Must have/Should have/Could have/Would like
Discuss those stories that are “Must have” and promote these higher up the sequence
Next, iterate over the “Should haves”, “Could haves” and “Would like to haves”
Now, plan a release that is achievable based on past velocity or team capacity. Include features based on priority, business value and their size estimates. Aim for the system to be usable while not having all the best and whistles. Draw a horizontal line below those features
You have just created your first release! That is the Minimum Viable Product (MVP) and everything above the line is included in the MVP
Repeat creating other releases based on past velocity or forecasted team capacity
As you can see, advanced user story writing allows us to create a product that is fit-for-purpose, prioritize work meaningfully, forecast when releases can be deployed to production and when the project will be done.
This article covers some basic concepts but there are specific techniques you will need, such as story elaboration, hierarchies, targeting personas, story splitting, impact mapping, etc. We offer advanced story writing workshops that meet your needs.
Contact us to learn more and deliver products that will wow your users! We provide training, workshops, and consulting to get your product game to the top of the league!
