Six Tips to make Story Mapping more effective

Story Mapping is a practice that helps you experience a customer or user journey. You would first capture the end-to-end customer experience by asking what would a user do? This includes establish a backbone, steps, and options.  

The story mapping process promotes the team to think through elements of what the customer finds as valuable from a process perspective. It moves away thinking of functionality first and instead advocates thinking about the customer experience first.  Then you would use an incremental approach of building, inspecting, and adapting for the next increment. What might be some tips to help you more effective work through a story mapping session? 

Tip #1 – Craft your Persona (aka, customer)

Draft the persona that will be taking the customer or user journey.  Place the persona at the top or head of the story map. This provides empathy for the user and inspiration for those that are attempting to craft the journey through the eyes of the user (via the story mapping practice).  Learn more about personas at Personas - Getting to really know your Customer.  

Tip #2 – Everyone stands up around the story map

As simple as it sounds, have everyone working on the story map session stand-up and around the story map as they are creating it. This keeps everyone engaged on crafting the story map.  

Tip #3 – Everyone writes options

When it comes time to imagine options for each step along the customer journey, provide everyone with a post-it pack and marker.  Ensure everyone knows that they should put up the option ideas as they think of them.  This gets lots of options up quickly. This also reduces any single threaded thinking where only one person is doing the writing.  

Tip #4 – Promote lots of chatter during Affinity of options

After a number of options are written by a number of people, it is time to determine if there are affinities.  This is a good opportunity to promote conversation for understanding the customer journey together as each option is discussed.

Tip #5 – Ask owners of options if they are similar

If two options are similar, ask the owner of each to determine if they form an affinity.  Often times when there are similar options on post-its, those that didn’t write them speak up to discuss if they are indeed related. Instead, those that wrote them should determine the affinity (or not) as they would know better.  

Tip #6 – Use verb/noun

Use short verb/noun phrases to capture the backbones, steps, and activities (e.g. capture my address, view my order status, receive invoice). This helps with understanding the expected action for each step of the user journey. 

You can learn details of executing a story mapping session at Story Telling with Story Mapping.

Divergent Thinking is Great for Innovation and Agile

Divergence is a concept that implies that something is different or develops in a different direction.  Divergent thinking takes this concept and applies it to help you gain new insights and solutions.  This concept can be extremely important in achieving an innovation mindset.  This can benefit your focus on innovation and agility leading to better business results.  

For a company, divergent thinking can be used as a technique that provides an opportunity to create an internal market place of ideas.  These ideas can then be discussed, refined, and evolved into multiple solution options. 

Divergent thinking provides individuals, teams, and companies with the ability to consider lots of possible ways to satisfy a business need. Once divergent thinking occurs, there is a need to pair this with convergent thinking so that one solution is decided upon and experimented with. 

Unfortunately Divergent thinking isn’t encouraged in many of work cultures.  While most companies will say they want new and innovative ideas, there is an angst to move quickly to an answer which typically negates the possibility of sufficient divergent thinking.  Converging too soon reduces options and opportunity. 

If you are looking to infuse a mindset where innovation can thrive, then explicitly introduce divergent thinking into your organization.  Innovation is often introduced in the form of hack days.  This is periodic and event driven.  A more effective approach may be to apply continuous divergent thinking throughout many of the steps of your idea to delivery (aka, end-to-end) process. 

Some may ask, “What is to keep divergent thinking from distracting or slowing down our work?”  The simple answer is to apply a time-box technique for divergent thinking.  A brief example is if you have a business opportunity (aka, idea), allow for a period of time to silently identify all possible solutions.  Place the ideas onto large post-ids and post them up.   

The key is to conduct the divergent thinking silently since this ensures no negative or anchored prejudice interferes.  Divergent thinking works best when ideas can flow freely without opposing opinions.  Once the time-boxed divergent period is concluded and all of the ideas are collected, then convergence may commence.

Divergent thinking is a great way to gain new insights and ideas for solutions to business problems and products.  If you are looking for ways to infuse innovative thinking into your organization, consider applying divergent thinking.  Divergent thinking may allow you to come up with the next generation idea or the 10x gain which can lead to better business results. 

Story Telling with Story Mapping

Once upon a time, a customer had a great buying experience on a website.  The customer loved how from the moment the customer was on the site to the moment they checked out a product, the process was intuitive and easy to use.   The process and design of the customer experience was not by accident.  In fact, it was done very methodically using story mapping. 

What is Story Mapping

Story Mapping is both a visual practice that provides you with an understanding of how a user might use a feature and a decomposition practice that helps you consider how you may incrementally decompose an idea. Established by Jeff Patton, the visual portion helps the team understand the customer experience by imagining what the customer process might be.  This promotes the team to think through elements of what the customer finds as valuable. 

The decomposition portion allows the team to think through a number of options which represent pieces of work (e.g. epics and user stories) on how to incrementally build the feature to gain the most feedback from the customer.  This helps both validate the value of the idea and ensures the idea is being built in a way that provides the best customer experience. 

Benefits of Story Mapping

Story Mapping is a way to bridge the gap between an idea and the incremental work ahead.  It's a great way to decompose an idea to a number of unique user stories.  What are some additional benefits of story mapping?

• It moves away from thinking of functionality first and toward the customer experience first. 
• It provides the big picture and end-to-end view of the work ahead
• It's a decomposition tool from idea to multiple user stories. 
• It asks the team to identify the highest value work from a customer perspective and where you may want the most customer feedback.
• It advocates cutting only one increment of work at a time instead realizing that feedback from the current increment will help shape subsequent increments. 

Getting started with Story Mapping

How might you get started in establishing a story map?  It starts by having wall space available to place the customer experience upon.  Next you educate the team on the story mapping process (see below).  Its best to keep to a Scrum team size (e.g., 7 +/-2), where everyone participates in the process.  Then as a team, follow these high-level steps:

• Create the “backbone” of the story map.  These are the big tasks that the users engage with. Capture the end-to-end customer experience.  Start by asking “what do users do?”  You may use a quiet brainstorming approach to get a number of thoughts on the wall quickly
• Then start adding steps that happen within each backbone.  
• From there explore activities or options within each step.  Ask, what are the specific things a customer would do here?  Are there alternative things they could do?  These activities may be epics and even user stories. 
• Create the “walking skeleton”.  This is where you slice a set of activities or options that can give you the minimum end-to end value of customer experience.  Only cut enough work that can be completed within one to three sprints that represents customer value. 

As you view the wall, the horizontal access defines the flow of which you place the backbone and steps.  The vertical access under each contains the activities or options represented by epics and user stories for that particular area. Use short verb/noun phrases to capture the backbones, steps, and activities (e.g. capture my address, view my order status, receive invoice). 

Next time your work appears to represent a customer experience, consider the story mapping tool as a way to embrace the customer perspective.  Story mapping provides a valuable tool for the team to understand the big picture, while decomposing the experience to more bite size work that allows for optionality for cutting an increment of work.  Its another tool in your requirements decomposition toolkit.