User Story Mapping

The story map approach feels very much like a condensed version of the define and ideate steps we learn in the design thinking process; within that context, it seems very needed. Needfinding, generating several personas and stories to match and brainstorming ideas, features, can all get overwhelming. These processes often end up identifying hundreds of needs and generating hundreds of potential features, and often the key MVP features get selected by some ranked choice voting, the others left in a general “later” pile. While these tactics can be effective, it’s easy to lose the mission of a product at the highest level, because we are thinking disjointedly rather than linearly. Thinking non-linearly is useful — ideating linearly can often lead to minimal, stagnant innovations — but also can remove a product from practical realism. Hence the “big picture” approach. Picking one user, one story, makes it far easier to choose what needs to be prioritized now rather than later, and brings us back to the point of conducting needfinding to begin with — to empathize with the user. I’d much rather create a feature set that wows one small set of users than a set of features that reaches a wide variety of user personas/