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Job map vs story map — what’s the difference?
We have been doing story map in our company for a while, then I recently came across terms like Job Map and JTBD (Jobs to be done). It sounded quite interesting, and I thought of sharing my understanding towards Job Map. Let’s see how it goes. Here, I will be comparing Job Map with the Story map.
It is not apples to apples comparison, I suppose, but they are created to uncover opportunities, find problems and solve them. So, why not give it a try?
This is based on my initial understanding towards Job Map, and I might have missed out some key points. Experts, please correct me If I am wrong.
Here is a basic glimpse of what Story Map and Job Map is,
Story Map
Story mapping keeps us focused on users and their experience, and the result is a better conversation, and ultimately a better product
- Jeff Patton
Story map helps the team in getting a shared understanding of the work to be done in their project. It is often a set of user stories grouped together and ordered to form a map that makes sense. It has a narrative flow from left to right, describing the user activities, and tasks from top to bottom, to support those activities.
Story map drives the team in getting into the smaller details of the goal that the organization is envisioning. It manages to chunk bigger activities into logical and meaningful tasks
Job Map
Job Map on the other hand aids in defining the vision and direction of the organization.
According to Ulwick and Bettencourt,
“Job mapping differs substantively from process mapping in that the goal is to identify what customers are trying to get done at every step, not what they are doing currently.”
The steps defined in the Job Map are Universal and not tied to any particular organization, demographic or user types.
Job map can be used as a framework for identifying the metrics and measuring the success of the task being executed. And it serves a more important purpose…
