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User Story Mapping

or

Partnering with your Devs

A strong opinion, strongly held, from Joshua Herzig-Marx

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Who is Josh Herzig-Marx?�20+ years of product experience, still full of shit.

5x first product person, including my own company.

Mostly learned from failing.

Joined “great resignation” to become primary parent.

Coach founders and solo PMs, participate in a few communities; trying to be as helpful as I can.

Connect with me: Linkedin, Slack…anywhere!

https://jhm.omg.lol/

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Goals for today

What problem are we trying to solve?
Why do we tell stories?
User story mapping process

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Founders’ jobs

Develop a deep, empathic understanding of user, customer, and market needs.

Ensure the rest of your team understands user, customer, and market needs.

Build a product that meets those needs.

Don’t run out of money.

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And if your devs don’t have that understanding?

Everything takes longer to build.
What they build has obvious mistakes.
It’s on you to describe everything about how the product needs to work.
You’ll spend all your time answering questions.
And it still won’t solve your users’ problems.

If your devs don’t have that understanding, the product will never be better than you.

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What’s the problem with just telling engineers what to build?

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Why writing down what you want doesn’t work

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Jagger’s Law of Product Management

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We align by telling ourselves stories

Writing a great story is a great place to start.

But you can’t trust that someone reading your story is going to understand what you meant.

We can reduce miscommunication by actively engaging in collaborative storytelling with our engineering teams.

A structured process can be helpful.

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Three step process:

Write the story down in a narrative format
Block it out visually
Bring in your engineering team to ask questions, rearrange stuff, and fully participate in the process.

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What does a great story look like?

From the user’s perspective, tell a clear and compelling story about what they are doing and why. Include who the user is, their physical location when doing it, what time it is, what triggers the activity, what they’re hoping to accomplish, etc. Sometimes, this might be better done as a press release, news story, video, comic, or demo.

Evocative. The person reading it can picture the scene in their head.
Heroic. There’s a main character who accomplishes something of value.
Specific. Where does it happen? When it is happening? Why did it start?
Clear. This is a tool for you to get clear in your head what you’re trying to do.

Alex and Chris recently joined Swimmly so they could rent out their pool and earn a little extra money. They’re relaxing in their living room one evening, watching TV, when Chris gets an email about Swimmly’s new Rent-a-Potty Service.

“Remember how last week that nice family was in and out of our house the whole time using the bathroom? It says here Swimmly will deliver a clean portable bathroom to our back yard and charge renters an extra $5 an hour!”

“You mean like a porta potty? Yuck!”

But despite their misgivings, Chris clicks the button in the email, logs into their Swimmly account, and clicks the “Add Rent-a-Potty” option to their backyard pool.

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What does a great story look like?

It’s clear who the user is and what type of customer they are
It explains what the customer is trying to achieve
A problem or challenge has been articulated
There’s an understanding of how often this problem is felt
There’s an indication of how important solving this problem is for the customer
There’s a description of how the customer is attempting to solve the problem right now
The situation or context of the customer is noted
The motivation for getting this task done has been identified

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Your product is a series of stories that we can map out visually.

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Big Goal

Smaller story

Task

Who is the hero?

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Get ready for work

Get to work

Wash up

Get dressed

Eat breakfast

Get in car

Drive to work

Park car

Go to desk

Start day

Wake up

Shower

Shave

Get dressed

Eat breakfast

Find keys

Wash dishes

Dry off

Lock house

Get on highway

Drive

Get off highway

Park car

Go to desk

Turn on computer

Make coffee

Say hi to friends

👩‍💼�Office worker

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Get ready for work

Get to work

Wash up

Get dressed

Eat breakfast

Get in car

Drive to work

Park car

Go to desk

Start day

Wake up

Shower

Shave

Get dressed

Eat breakfast

Find keys

Wash dishes

Dry off

Lock house

Get on highway

Drive

Get off highway

Park car

Go to desk

Turn on computer

Make coffee

Say hi to friends

👩‍💼�Office worker

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Resources

Read the book: User Story Mapping

Where to map?

Miro: User Story Mapping Template | Miro
Figjam: Story Mapping Template | Figjam
With actual cards or stickies

Need more help?

https://zcal.co/jhm/story-mapping