How to: user story mapping workshop
If you’re a product analyst, product owner, product designer (or even a software engineer) and haven’t read the book “User Story Mapping: Discover the Whole Story, Build the Right Product” by Jeff Patton, then drop everything and read it now! This article is mainly useful for someone who has read the book and needs a guide to conduct a user story mapping workshop.
Introduced in 2014, user story mapping is a great tool for backlog visualization. In his book, Jeff Patton presents how and why you should create story maps to give your team a shared understanding of what you’re attempting to build and why. Story maps spark conversations and enable your team to have better conversations about the project throughout the development process.
Why I created this guide
I loved the book (which you can find here) and I wanted to try out everything in it. Then, when a project for a new digital solution came up at Blackboard Insurance (where I currently work), I knew User Story Mapping would be ideal to apply. To prepare for the workshop, I had read the book, in which I had learned about the activities, the goals and outcomes. But one thing I was missing was how to actually carry it out in practice. I found very few resources online describing how to carry out user story mapping step-by-step.
This experience was very different from the first time I did a Design Sprint (you can find it here), where I easily and quickly found a bunch of excellent resources explaining how to carry it out step-by-step. Especially the free articles by the authors themselves (Jake Knapp and John Zeratsky) were very clear, straight-forward, and intuitive to follow.
Though the lack of great resources, I ended up stitching together a solid plan, I facilitated a successful user story mapping workshop, and from this I decided to publish a step-by-step guide for how to carry out a user story mapping workshop. Note: this is the first time I create a guide like this, and it is still work-in-progress and will be iterated on continuously. This means that everything is subject to change, and I would love your input.
Please feel free to copy, steal and claim any content from this guide as I have created it for you. ☺️
Setting the stage
Before your user story mapping workshop begins, you’ll need to have some important things in place. These things can take time to get set up, so make sure you have that time. Below you’ll find detailed checklists for everything you need to get done before carrying out the workshop.
Checklist for setting the stage
❏ Get a Decision-maker. To foster progress and decision-making in the workshop, you’ll need one person that will have the responsibility of making decisions along the way. Typically, this would be the business owner of the project.
❏ Find the right team. I’d recommend finding 7-10 people to participate in the workshop. Make sure to include people with different roles and skill sets in your organization. Must-haves include the product owner, business owner, an engineer, a product designer and a researcher. When you invite these people, make sure to explain why their participation is important — this will create more buy-in. Tip: to complete the workshop in 1 day (about 7 hours) do not involve more than 15 people.
❏ Get someone with the clear vision. Ask someone from the leadership to define the long-term vision for the project. It shows your participants that your leadership is behind the project and that they consider it a priority.
❏ Pick a Facilitator. The facilitator will manage time, conversations, and the overall workshop activities. Look for someone who’s confident leading a meeting and synthesizing discussions on the fly. It might be you!
❏ If you don’t have some already — create (proto) personas. Sit down with a (UX) researcher and create a persona template based on the data you have about the users and the product. This will help get everyone aligned from the beginning of the workshop, and these personas will be vital when you start putting together the journey.
Checklist for supplies needed
❏ Post-its. You’ll need lots of post-its in three different colors (I recommend purple/dark blue, light blue and yellow).
❏ Sharpies. I recommend the fine-point sharpies that are easy to read on a post-it from afar.
❏ Time Timer. For keeping time throughout the workshop. This will help visualizing how much time the participants have for each activity.
The two parts
Part One: Map It All
List the relevant users, their tasks, and what is needed to enable these.
Part Two: Prioritize It All
Prioritize the tasks according to the highest priority of the strategy.
Checklist for Part One: Map It
Note: the checklists are approximations. You can use them as inspiration or follow them strictly.
10 a.m.
❏ Introductions. If some people don’t know one another, do a round of introductions. Point out the Facilitator and the Decision-maker and describe their roles. Here, it would also be a good idea to include some kind of ice-breaker to loosen up the crowd and set the stage for creativity.
10:20 a.m.
❏ Explain the workshop. Describe the origin and purpose of user story mapping, the core activities and outline the process. Because it’s complex, people might not fully grasp what’s involved initially. Don’t worry if that’s the case. It will become clearer as you get into the different exercises.
10:30 a.m.
❏ Present the vision. Make the person you have decided to present the vision present. This is important to align the team with the outcomes, the expected value, the overall ‘why’ of the project from the get-go.
10:40-ish
❏ Present and rank user personas. List key (potential) users of the product. Ideally, you would use pre-made user personas from previous research (this is a big time-saver). Make sure to go over the goals and desired value for the user personas. Tip: Ask the crowd if the persona descriptions lack anything. This will make them think about what they actually say.
After the presentation, rank the personas by priority and give each of them a different colored dot. This will be used for the later prioritization.
11:00 a.m.
❏ List the user tasks. To start the story mapping, ask everyone to individually write down on a post-it every step each user will take through the product — from their first touch to the point they leave. Tip: keep it to 1 step per post-it and make them start with a verb.
❏ Organize the tasks into activities. Ask everyone to stick each post-it up on the wall in the order the personas will do the tasks (chronologically). Move duplicative or similar ideas next to one another. Look for logical groupings within your line of user tasks, collecting together all the tasks that contribute to the user achieving a wider goal. Label these groups as overall activities (3–5 words).
❏ List the stories. Ask everyone to individually write down on a post-it everything that needs to be in place in your product to let the user achieve the goal of the activity. Each of these smaller units becomes the headline of a user story. It’s important these are written meaningfully.
❏ Organize the story “stubs”. As a team, post the stubs up under the user tasks, and the wider epic, that they apply to. If there are duplicates, choose the best and stick that up.
You should have a comprehensive map by this stage. To make sure you do, get people to walk down the line to see if there are any gaps.
1 p.m.
Give a one-hour break.
Checklist for Part Two: Prioritize It
The objective of the second part is for everyone to discuss and define the minimum viable product. This is done by prioritizing all the stories into releases.
2 p.m.
❏ Decide which stories mainly benefit one persona and stick that persona’s dot on those stories. Straight away you can see which stories offer the most to your most valued persona.
>2:15 p.m.
❏ Do a MoSCoW. Stick up three horizontal strips of tape across the wall. Leave room between the strips. You’ll be grouping user story post-its into swim lanes between these lines. Next we decide which stories we Must, Could, Should and Would do.
❏ Now move all the Musts above the top line of tape. While you’re at it, move all the other stories below the line, grouping them into Shoulds, Coulds and Won’ts. You can then arrange the user stories under the epic they help achieve.
❏ Define MVP. You now have your stories ranked in priority from top to bottom. At the top, the collection of Musts is your Minimum Viable Product. It’s the first thing you’ll be working on (though not the only thing). Get the team to walk along the map and make sure these Musts are all and only the stories needed to produce a cohesive, standalone product that lets customers complete enough of their goals that they’ll adopt your offering.
Tip: You need a ruthless focus on including only the minimum in your Minimum Viable Product.
This is the end of my guide. Hopefully, some of the thoughts here will help you design your own user story mapping workshop. Please let me know if there is anything missing or wrong.
Next steps
The user story mapping workshop is a great tool for kicking off a project. But it will only be successful if you have a clear plan for how to use these insights. These are some buckets of ‘next steps’ that you could consider to follow as well.
❏ Refine the stories and plan.
❏ Design the solution.
❏ Set up weekly reviews of designs.
❏ Start planning for development.
Books mentioned
User Story Mapping can be found on Amazon to about $30.
Design sprint can be found on Amazon for about $30 as well.
