Above everything else, some takeaways from the “introduction” are:
- Stories aren’t a written form of requirements. You tell stories to build shared understanding, and you do that by collaborating with words and pictures.
- Stories aren’t the requirements. They are the discussions about solving problems (whether for org, customers, users) which lead to agreements on what to do and build.
which leads us to… User story mapping!
Prior to 177, I never formally used story mapping in my classes or as a way to build shared understanding before. Oftentimes, I’d experience meeting people in person and having many great discussions but never documenting them in a way that enables such flexibility, or simply receiving messages/documents to work from. User story mapping is brilliant: the idea is that you write down ideas on sticky notes/index cards, which then lets you move them around to tell a story, discover/build/convey sequences, prioritize/decide what’s important, and have many great discussions that everyone can genuinely follow along and refer back to. Most people look at the map and instantly know what’s going on; left-to-right tells the story in the correct steps, whereas top to bottom contains all of the details. Everything around the map tends to be the critical parts that provide more context, such as product goals or information about the users.
As the author says, writing cards/sticky notes means that your words “don’t vaporize”; everyone can quickly recall a conversation about that card or refer back to them later, which is very invaluable. Reorganizing the placement of the cards lets you communicate without saying a word — story mapping does so much to build shared understanding. People in a team might have an idea of what they personally contributed, but story mapping lets everyone gain a clear picture of the big picture and how all of the steps interact. When you story map, you start by writing all of your ideas down on the stickies/cards, and begin to organize them. You then walk through each section to check that it makes sense to everyone. In doing so, people get the flow for the user through every single step. People can easily see where exactly they fit into the overall process and the reason why they’re doing something at a particular place, while others may realize they’re being left out of certain steps. As I experienced in 177, story mapping was perfect for getting a sense of the users we were targeting, the flow we wanted to experience, everything we needed to do to build that user flow, and any gaps where we could work together better.
