Build products users really need.

Personas capture the goals, behaviors and needs of your end users. Personas bring the story map to life and they should be kept in mind whenever you add new features to you product.

Personas can be real world people or made up.

Invite customers and stakeholders and map out the user journey.

Start by identifying goals. To break it down further, each goal is broken down into a set of consecutive activities.

Map one or several personas to each goal.

With the help of stakeholders formulate user stories and capture acceptance criteria of what you want to build. Add as much details to your feature as necessary for your team to get to work.

Map each feature to a user activity on your story map.

Annotate and estimate your features.

Collaborate on your stories by adding comments to it.

Each feature need to be mapped to a release. The golden rule is that each release needs to be a valuable product slice across the user journey. They most important features are pulled to the top. You want to start out simple and then expand on the functionality of your product by adding new product slices.

Cards on the board can be moved around using drag-and-drop.

Keep an eye on the size of your release. Feature estimates are rolled-up on both feature and user journey level.

Story maps is the perfect tool to communicate you product vision with members of your team and with non-technical stakeholders. It beautifully pulls together the big picture, product priorities and progress while not forgetting the details. Your story maps can be shared with anyone, no Featmap account required.

Story maps makes it easy to answer questions like:

What's the overall flow of the app?

What's in our next release?

How are we progressing with the release?

Can you help me understand this feature?