Have you ever stared at your backlog and gone cross-eyed? You have a hundred well-defined tickets, all placed in their sprints or waiting for their chance to be slated for work. Your team is resourced. You have an idea of the feature you’re cranking out next.
But does it ever feel like your backlog is a monster to-do list instead of a map of where you’re going? How do you keep a 10,000-ft view of the thing you’re building when you’re heads down in your user stories?
User Story Mapping (pioneered by Jeff Patton) is not a new concept, but it will transform the way you approach Drupal projects. At its core, it’s a method of planning the development of your product, new feature or website in a way that maintains context and keeps the “why” front and center. It externalizes “requirements” thinking into real conversations and actually gives meaning to your user stories in an Agile environment.
The key part of this method is an initial map-building workshop. We’ll walk you through how to structure it, what you’ll need to be ready for it, and how you can plan your work from it. The workshop yields a map that defines:
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All the main activities people do with your product or website
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The discrete steps that fit into those activities
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All the the tiny tasks users might do as part of those steps, and the details around how those experiences might get built
What you end up with is a tangible map of your entire product, top to bottom, left to right, from a user’s perspective. From there you can prioritize into releases, explain it to your clients or internal stakeholders at-a-glance, and finally have a clue how your individual tickets fit into the greater whole.