Story mapping for communication and agility

Story mapping and agile methodology

What is story mapping?

Story mapping is a very powerful tool that brings together paradigms from project management, development and design. This consists of representing in visual form the different (user) stories corresponding to functionalities.

These functionalities are then hierarchised and grouped according to common subjects called Themes. Finally if necessary each theme will be split into Epics grouping each of the stories.

This work is carried out to understand all users’ needs but also to enable different versions of a solution to be envisaged and to produce an MVP (minimum viable product).

It is a good communication tool between clients and the development and design teams.

How to build it?

In order to produce a story mapping, we start from the analysis of the user's needs. This analysis is carried out by the UX / UI team during the workshop to collect the requirements and discuss with the customer. A user journey is then identified on the expected use of the product allowing these needs to be linked to functionalities.

Once this research and analysis work has been carried out, the stories are classified under themes and ranked in a table to define their order of priority and also, if necessary, the version of the solution to which they belong.

The benefits of the agile method

The story mapping is a global vision of the project, its realization allows to organize the sprint and to assign a workload to each story. This representation promotes the sharing of a common vision of the project, encourages and facilitates back and forth between a detailed view and a more general view and allows the user to be placed in the design loop.

Thus, when discussing a feature, we do so with the need to meet a user’s expressed need, knowing its level of detail within the project and knowing which steps have been completed or still need to be done.