Scrum Agile Project Management

Build your Product Backlog with Story Mapping

Story mapping is a technique invented by Jeff Patton that order user stories along two independent dimensions. The “map” arranges user activities along the horizontal axis in rough order of priority. On the vertical axis, it represents increasing sophistication of the implementation. In his blog post, Sunit Parekh explains how you can apply story maps to build your product backlog in a visual way.

Sunit Parekh starts by explaining what is a story map. He presents also the six advantages of story mapping. Then, he explains how you can enrich story maps with follow up questions or alternative approaches. He presents alternative ways to structure story map, using for instance the “user journey” perspective. The blog post ends with what is needed to perform a story mapping activity and the traps you need to avoid to you run the story mapping successfully. His conclusion is that “Story mapping is an effective inception tool to create a product backlog in a visually structured way. It helps in building a shared understanding, identify gaps in the backlog, see interdependencies, perform better relative sizing. Further, it can also help in slicing and release planning activities.”

Read the complete blog post on https://www.thoughtworks.com/insights/blog/story-mapping-visual-way-building-product-backlog