The User Journey Map Begins With Epic Storytelling
Storytelling is an excellent way to describe anything because stories conjure detailed images. Once you create a visual association, cognitive processes leap into action to make the story in the user journey map a reality that is easy to track.
This is what the customer journey map (CJM) is all about—epic storytelling that involves comprehensive planning to capture the design process and deliver a unique customer experience.
Creating a customer journey map (also called the user journey map) involves planning a project from the user’s point of view and using personas, epics, features, user stories, and tasks. This visualization process also involves several stakeholders as user personas on the road to planning perfection.
By the end of the project, your CJM should help achieve business goals and exceed customer expectations with enough touchpoints along the way to motivate satisfaction. The process is a little like rubbing Aladdin's lamp to manifest your deepest wishes.
What is the user journey map?
In contrast to the flat backlog, the customer journey map makes the vision for your project come alive in real-time. You get to use creative storytelling to generate a magical customer experience through visual representations.
Project team members accomplish this by developing an empathy map to an almost-perfect plan from the customer’s perspective. User journey mapping captures the customer’s emotional state, which helps identify touchpoints and pain points. Teams then use these points to elevate the customer experience.
Unlike rubbing a genie’s lamp for results, you get to use convenient software to develop a service blueprint where design thinking reflects a shared vision between stakeholders.
The starting point is to anticipate customer interactions with the mobile app or other e-commerce project development story. That’s why user research is another vital element in developing the customer journey map template.
This customer journey map template should also draw valuable information from the empathy map and the experience map. An in-depth understanding of the KPIs and metrics that go into storytelling helps direct product usability through appreciating customer interactions with the product.
Customer interactions generate feedback, which leads to understanding customer's needs. Additional touchpoints can then be included or modified to build on the overall project outcomes.
Essentially, you use hierarchical storytelling on a magical customer journey map template to meet real-life expectations that resonate with the customer experience.
The customer journey mapping hierarchy
When beginning the journey to create the ideal customer experience, team members should visualize the project from the user’s current state. Once you capture the essence of the current customer perspective, you can better understand what needs to change and improve.
A simple example may be a travel app that encompasses services such as travel agent services, flight bookings, and accommodation in a geographical area (present state). The client wants to create a future state app which contains tourist activities to augment the customer experience. The basic process will then look like this:
For app customers who want a value-add experience with our travel app which is a helpful resource that provides tips on local tourist activities.
Your user journey map hierarchy involves four building blocks to meet customers’ needs:
- Understanding user personas or buyer personas
- Developing themes and epics to address touchpoints
- Using steps or features to support epics and the narrative flow
- The stories in the customer journey map
1. Understand user personas or buyer personas
The user journey map starts with defining the user personas or buyer personas as vital stakeholders in project development. These customer personas represent the top of the hierarchy, which is the starting point of the customer journey map.
A detailed visual reflection of the user persona is vital to getting your final product right. To deliver this, you need to walk through the story mapping journey from the customer’s perspective. This helps avoid the nasty consequences of inadequate planning that results in sub-optimum deliverables and unhappy teams and customers.
To understand user personas, you need to identify the various potential touchpoints in the journey and customer pain points through use cases and feedback. You’ll need to anticipate as many potential scenarios as possible from the buyer persona’s perspective.
Although the “who,” “what,” and “why” are instrumental in defining the user story, it all begins with visualizing user personas and thinking about customer behaviors, demographics, needs, and goals.
Once you define who your customer personas are, you can follow up with themes and epics to deliver on customer expectations. The epics are the heroes or heroines in this story visualization method.
2. Develop themes and epics to address touchpoints
The customer journey map positions epics at the top of the storyboard because they are vital to creating a great project.
Team leaders must consult with the client and relevant stakeholders to develop an overarching project theme, to translate into epics. Epics flow through this theme from left to right. These epics show large bodies of work broken down into smaller features which can meet continuous delivery value.
Epics are also strategic directives that begin with the current state of an issue and move the situation into a desirable future state. This epic future state is built on tactics, or features and tasks, which team members use to clarify project requirements and move toward that magical future state of project success.
Before team members can move forward, they need to get the epics right. Epics cover three fundamental foundations: user persona, product, and design requirements, which reflect visually on the user journey map.
The epics should meet several foundational requirements:
- Follow through by aligning the overall business goals with detailed buyer personas and demographics
- Broadly outline the user persona’s needs
- Meet specific customer needs by addressing touchpoints and pain points
- Include specific functions, features, and benefits
- Produce a future state ideal project
After designing your heroic epics to cover the project's primary goals, you can start breaking these into steps that integrate with the overall narrative flow of the user story.
3. Use epics for highlighting the narrative flow
Once you clearly define your epics, it’s time to generate narrower steps or features.
As your epics move from left to right, you must define each of the necessary steps to accomplish business goals. This customizable process uses epics to relay the user journey over the project duration to reflect project outcomes.
The customer journey map template also forms the basis of the ideal user story as you transition from epics to features. The features originate from the epics, which is why the epics are the heroes in this story. They “save” customers with excellent planning and deliverables.
At its most basic level, features should include the following elements:
- Deliverables that add value and support epics completion
- Generate business value by considering KPIs, metrics, customer acquisition, and retention
- Demonstrate sufficient definition for team members to follow through on time estimates and complete tasks within one to three sprints
- Team members must be able to test the results of their features
- Establish test criteria for each feature to set acceptable quality standards that meet customer expectations before moving to the next step
In short, the user acceptance criteria (UAC) in the user journey map should include a brief item value description, a feature benefit explanation, and the feature quality completion points that team members must achieve.
Only once you nail these details can you tell the user stories from the customer's perspective. Similarly, only once you complete these three fundamental building blocks in the customer journey map can you focus on user stories and business goals that include customer satisfaction and retention.
4. Begin storytelling through the user journey map
After the third step in the hierarchy of the user journey map, the actual user stories begin. This is the final step in design thinking related to the visualization of epics into manageable stories and tasks.
To state the buyer persona case, team members must understand the “who,” “what,” and “why” of the customer experience. Understanding and defining the customer personas forms the basis of user story creation, enabling delivery of the most acceptable product possible.
Developing the best story relies on creating user stories that highlight the customer experience and use cases that highlight the finer details of system performance.
In the story creation phase, team members assume the customer’s perspective to define requests. Team members can consider exploring social media to understand customer behavior and experiences to use as story inputs. User stories can also include enabler tasks to augment feature completion.
Team members typically write their user stories to complete these in short sprints. Sprint completion involves task completion for release before completing one epic and moving to the next, except where concurrent work is possible.
Ultimately, the user journey map must tell the customer’s story of how their need will be met by creating or modifying a product, process, service, or system feature. New developments must follow through on the formula of “as a…” “I want…” “so that...”
As a new Agile team member, I want to understand my and other team member's roles so that I am clear about my tasks and the responsibilities of other team members.
After generating user stories, team members can break tasks into even smaller parts to facilitate work deliverables and reduce potential churn that negatively impacts customer retention.
As the user journey map progresses, the stories should clearly outline the activities for completion, always linking these back to buyer persona goals. The smaller, granular tasks then relate to user behaviors, and the outcomes link to each step of the process to reinforce what deliverables will meet customer needs within set timeframes.
During the customer journey map, stories can be split further to accomplish greater clarity.
Bottom line: The customer journey map
Through the customer journey mapping process, you should capture the primary epics of the user journey in the story map visualization.
You will need to develop the user story map holistically and interrupt it with additions and subtractions in an iterative fashion. This iterative user story mapping process helps minimize churn as you continue to update your story as you move forward.
Once the project is done, you need to test the product on potential customers, gather customer feedback, and improve the user journey map.
The benefits of carefully planning the customer experience through a visual format are exponential.
Tell your project story with Easy Agile User Story Maps for Jira
The customer journey should highlight the ideal user experience. To do this, the user story map should incorporate the project from user personas to achieve stories with valuable touchpoints as markers along the way.
Once the visual representation is done, it should validate the service blueprint for the customer journey mapping process through the current and future states of the project.
Throughout the project, your team should create a unique user journey that delivers the ultimate customer experience and exceeds customer expectations.
Try Easy Agile TeamRhythm and Personas today to make your customers' stories come alive with magic.
Related Articles
WorkflowWhy User Story Mapping?
What is User Story Mapping? And more importantly, WHY would you want to run a story mapping session with your team?
Let’s start off by talking about the origins of User Story Mapping.It’s now a common practice in agile software development, but it wasn’t always that way.
If you have experience with a Scrum or Kanban backlog, you've likely run into the dreaded flat backlog.
Why Story Mapping
In its simplest form, a flat product backlog is a laundry list of stuff 'to do' that will ultimately provide some form of value to your users/customers. At least we hope so.
Many of us have contributed to making these backlogs longer and longer, and they inevitably become overwhelming.
Regardless of whether the team pulls work from the backlog one-by-one or groups it into sprints, prioritizing work in a flat backlog comes with its challenges.
The flat backlog is a 2 dimensional view. It’s like a shopping list, which doesn’t provide context for the work.
Enter, the User Story Map! The concept of a User Story Map was born out of a desire to kill the flat backlog and create a more holistic, customer centric overview of our work.
A user story map is a visualisation of the journey a customer takes with a product, and includes the activities and tasks they would typically complete.
Usually conducted at the beginning of a Project, a user story mapping session is done with the sole purpose of creating a shared understanding amongst the team of who your customers are and how you should focus your time working on stories that provide the most value for them.You can do this on a whiteboard with sticky notes, or you can do it in Jira using our app, Easy Agile TeamRhythm.
How to build a user story map
To create a visualisation of the journey a customer takes with a product, start by identifying each stage, and then list the activities and tasks the customer would typically complete for each.
Next, begin to associate each item of work in the backlog with its corresponding touchpoint in the customer journey.
At this point in a User Story Mapping session, a matrix should begin to emerge, containing a list of tasks or stories to which the team has committed to delivering, organized according to the steps in the customer journey.
From there, the map is divided into the time blocks the team uses to plan their work. For example, in sprint 1, the team might commit to 5 user stories, which are attached to 3 epics.
This helps build understanding of how progress will be made against larger pieces of work.
Why user story mapping is better than a flat backlog
Connecting the work in the backlog to the customer journey in this way begins to answer key questions like:
- WHY are we building this?
- WHO are we building this for?
- WHAT value will it provide them?
- WHEN do we expect to deliver this?
User story mapping essentially converts the 2D flat backlog in a three-dimensional view, because it gives us a way to say, “ok I’m currently working on building this user story, and I can visualise what piece of the customer journey this will be directly impacting AND we know when it will be delivered.”
Also, by putting the focus on the user, a story map ensures that the backlog contains work that add real value for the customer by helping them achieve their goals.
How to run a user story mapping session
Now that you have a better understanding of the value of a User Story Map, let's look at how to create one. First, you’ll need to set up a Story Mapping session with your team.
But whatever you do, don’t make it an open invite. This is really important, because if you don’t have the right people in the room then it won’t be effective.
People you could consider inviting are:
The product owner for the team
- a tech lead
- a user experience designer
- a marketing lead
- a data analyst and,
- someone from customer support
It’s also important to set some ground rules for the session.
There should be one person facilitating the session. A good practice is to involve a Product Manager from another team to run the session.
Depending on the scope of the story mapping session you may want to take a whole day or spread it out over a couple of days.
The scope all depends on how big your team is and how many user stories you need to add to your map.There should be no phones or laptops out except for the facilitator.
Also, everyone in the room should be familiar with the user stories being discussed.Now that you know the benefits of a user story map and what to consider when setting up the mapping session with your team, start thinking about who you can invite to participate in and facilitate the session.
WorkflowAnatomy of an Agile User Story Map
A user story map is a collaborative practice that guides an agile team in the creation of their product backlog.
The story map captures the journey a customer takes with the product including activities and tasks they undertake.
Creating the story map as a team ensures team members are on the same page from the start of development through to ongoing delivery of new releases.
In this post we’ll explore the aspects of a successful story map.
Backbone
A backbone provides structure. The backbone of the user story map captures the high level activities a user will accomplish while using the product.
If we take a simple example, buying and watching a movie on an Apple TV, we may have the following activities:
- select movie
- purchase movie
- watch movie
- review / recommend movie
For a user to watch a movie on the Apple TV they would have to complete three of these activities. And there may be other follow up activities such as writing a review or recommending the movie to a friend which we want to encourage.
Chronological Order
Once we’ve got the activities of the backbone identified we will order them in the chronological order of how a user will interact with the product. Following on with the Apple TV example we will make sure the order is correct:
It is common to rearrange existing activities or add new activities as the discussion unfolds. This is a key benefit of the collaborative approach to building the product backlog as we have the shared wisdom of an entire team involved in the discussion.
Stories
Below each activity on the backbone we create user stories which flesh out the customer journey. For example, below the ‘select movie’ activity we may see stories for:
- free text search
- browse by genre
- browse by recent addition
- browse by most popular
- browse by most popular by genre
- browse by recent addition by genre
These stories are ordered by value to the user. Value may be identified through conversations with users, analytics on usage patterns, or another form of insight appropriate for your product.
Sequence
Once the team has the backbone and stories ordered it is time to sequence the work. What do we want to deliver in our MVP, our 1.0, 2.0, etc.
We split the story map horizontally to show what is in and out of each release.
We can then begin delivery, and as we deliver releases we can track our progress against the story map. Product Managers will often start a sprint planning session by reviewing the story map to ensure that all team members are still on the same page.
User story maps turn a flat backlog into a vivid representation of the customers journey.
A few final tips:
Keep the story map up to date as work progresses so stakeholders can visualise progress in real time;
Use the story map to communicate the roadmap with customers and share the product vision.
User story mapping is an essential practice for every agile team. They are an excellent technique for ensuring the team understands their customers, can clearly articulate the solution and stays focused on delivery.
At Easy Agile we’re converts to the practice of story mapping. In fact we’re so passionate about user story mapping that we created a JIRA add-on that assists teams with conducting sessions. Try Easy Agile TeamRhythm today.
WorkflowWhat is User Story Mapping?
Backlogs are so full of potential, right? Ideas and possibilities for your product to become bigger and better than ever before.
But when you’ve got more than a few items on your list, backlogs are also overwhelming.
Without some kind of clear structure or prioritization, your team won’t know what to work on first.
They might work on whatever they feel like, whatever’s easiest, or most interesting, or not do anything at all.
You need a way to figure out what you should work on first. Not only that, but you need to make sure that what you’re doing delivers value to customers, makes sense for each release, fits into the bigger picture of your organization’s goals.
That’s where user story mapping comes in.
What is user story mapping?
User story mapping is a useful way to organize and prioritize your user stories so that you can schedule your work and design your releases.
It helps you visualize the customer’s journey through your product from start to finish, including all the tasks they’d normally complete along the way.
What’s a user story mapping session?
User story mapping is usually done in sessions over 1-2 days where you bring key people together in the same room.
During these sessions, your product manager (and sometimes other stakeholders) shares their customer insights with the team, who also share their ideas for the product.
Together, you brainstorm user stories, unpack the steps in your customer journey, list out any current issues, and put these onto a user story map. Your user story mapping session gets everyone on the same page about what needs to happen.
What’s a user story map?
A user story map is the artefact or visual board you produce as a result of a user story mapping session.
Your teams will refer to this map throughout each sprint to make sure they’re on schedule, coordinate dependencies, and keep sight of the big picture.
What’s a user story?
In order to understand what a user story map is, it’s important to take a step back and define one of the key components: the user story.
A user story is a goal or outcome that the user or customer wants to achieve. Usually, you’ll write user stories like this:
“As a [persona type], I want to [action] so that [benefit].”
A user story should be the smallest unit of work that can deliver value back to the customer.
You might also consider a user story to be a task that’s written from the user or customer’s perspective. User stories are usually added to your backlog, and from there, you can arrange and prioritize them, and plot them on a user story map so that they’re scheduled to a release or sprint.
Read more about user stories in our blog: How to write good user stories in agile software development.
What does a user story map look like?
User story mapping is traditionally done on a physical story mapping board:
But increasingly, companies are doing their story mapping digitally. If you use Easy Agile User Story Maps, yours might like more like this:
Whether you do your user story mapping physically or digitally, you’ll see both approaches have a few things in common:- A backbone (the row along the top of the sticky notes), often consisting of epics
- Cards or sticky notes with user stories under each item in the backbone
- These stories are sequenced vertically from most important (to the customer) at the top, to least important at the bottom
- Horizontal cut lines or swimlanes define where your releases or sprints start and stop
(Psst: read more in our blog, Anatomy of an agile user story map.)What’s involved in a user story mapping session?
A user story mapping session involves discussing and planning all the parts that make up your story map:
- Your team will get together and decide on the backbone - the big steps that make up your user journey.
- Next they’ll brainstorm user stories - all the little steps that make up the user journey and any issues (bugs or ideas) and add them to the backlog.
- They’ll organize these stories under the backbone item they’re associated with.
- Next they’ll discuss and estimate the work involved in each user story, assigning story points.
- After that, your team can add cut lines to mark out what they’ll deliver and when - either by sprint or release. At this point, you might shuffle some stories around if it makes sense for the user to get them in the same release.
- If everyone’s happy with the plan, the story map is done (for now) and it’s time for your team to start the first sprint.
That seems like an awful lot of effort. So, what’s the point?
What’s the point of user story mapping?
User story mapping benefits both your customers and your team.
Customers get more value delivered, sooner
helps you understand what your customers want. Because the focus is on the customer journey and what tasks they’d need to complete in order to use your product, it helps you prioritize work that’ll help fill in the gaps for customers and deliver value to them.
Teams prioritize and collaborate better
A three-dimensional view helps with prioritization because your team can see what user stories should be grouped within a release to deliver a new experience for users. For example, adding the ability to customize your profile isn’t all that meaningful unless you have a community aspect where users can view other profiles and/or interact with one another. User story mapping helps you fit all the pieces together - and make sure you can realistically deliver them within the sprint or release.
Plus, you can more effectively plan your work and collaborate as a team with your user story map. That’s because you can see the big picture and full customer journey before you start the work.
For more insights, check out our blog on why user story mapping.
What’s the alternative to user story mapping?
If you haven’t done user story mapping until now, you’ve likely been using another method to understand customer requirements and plan/prioritise your work.
The most common approach is known as the “flat backlog”. Essentially, this is a task list that’s ordered from highest to lowest priority, and might be broken up by cut lines for sprints or version releases. The flat backlog is simple (it’s basically a to-do list) but if you have a complex product, lots of teams working on it, dependencies, and a massive, ever-changing backlog… you’re going to need something more robust so that you don’t lose sight of your goals, customer-focus, and priorities.
Speaking of alternatives, check out this little story from one of our customers…
What user story mapping can do for teams
"Our teams were looking for an alternative view to the standard Jira backlog/board view, which doesn't lend itself to organizing and grooming massive backlogs with lots of epics.
The Easy Agile User Story Maps app allows our teams to better organize their work. The user interface is logical, and product owners (who are usually non-technical folk) like the layout of cards in columns under their respective epics.This vertical view seems to foster better communication doing planning meetings and does a great job of providing a visualization of what comes next."
- Christopher Heritage, The Atlassian Team @NextEra Energy
So, as you can see from this example, a lot of teams start with flat backlogs or board views, but find that they outgrow this as their backlog gets bigger.
How user story mapping can upgrade your flat backlog
What makes user story mapping different from the flat backlog is that it has a whole other element. It’s not flat, but more three-dimensional.
You’ve got the list of activities/tasks, but they’re first sorted by how they impact the customer journey. Only then are they prioritized and broken up by when they’re being released.
User story mapping is a little more complex to set up than the flat backlog, but it makes the work more meaningful, customer-focused, and impactful. With a user story map, you can see the big picture and collaborate on it.
We talk more about this in our blog, The difference between a flat product backlog and a user story map.
Try user story mapping inside Jira
Want to know the best way to understand what user story mapping is?
You can’t learn how to ride a bike by reading about it. And you can’t *really* learn what user story mapping is without doing it and experiencing the benefits firsthand.
So, give it a try!
If your team uses Jira for project management and workflows, you can get an add-on that helps you turn that flat backlog into a three dimensional user story map.
Easy Agile User Story Maps for Jira creates the X-axis so you can add your customer journey backbone and organize your stories to fit into this journey. That way, your team gets the big-picture view of what they’re working on, and they can prioritize tasks to deliver maximum value to your customers, sooner.
Best of all, you can do all your user story mapping inside of Jira so that it’s digital, collaborative, and constantly available to your team - even if they’re working remote/distributed. And since it fits in with your existing backlog, you can hit the ground running with pre-filled user stories. In other words, you can expect to save a whole bunch of time.
You can get started with Easy Agile User Story Maps for Jira, with a FREE 30-day trial today or check out the demo here.
Hopefully, you’ll find it just as useful as our customers…
We’ve found that Easy Agile User Story Maps brings the team together in one room. As a result, we find ourselves mapping more as a group, which creates a common understanding. Since using the add-on, we’ve been able to speed up planning and more efficiently conduct large story mapping exercises.
- Mike Doolittle, Product Director @Priceline
Since using Easy Agile User Story Maps, we’ve improved our communication and team alignment, which has helped give us faster results.
- Casey Flynn, Distribution Forecast Analyst @adidas
Easy Agile User Story Maps has helped us visualize our workload and goals, as well as speed up our meetings. We love the simplicity!
- Rafal Zydek, Atlassian Jira and Confluence Expert Administrator @ING Tech Poland
With Easy Agile User Story Maps, we find it much easier to use and navigate Jira. Our favorite features include the ability to drag and drop stories across the Epics, being able to view the work using FixVersion and Sprint Swim Lanes, and Excel export. We’ve been using Story Maps functionality for quite sometime now and I recommend it to other project teams, as well.
- Sathish K Mohanraj, Lean-Agile Coach @Equifax
Learn more about user story mapping
Want to learn more about user story mapping? Check out our User story mapping ultimate guide - it has everything (and we mean everything) you could possibly want to know.
We’re always happy to answer your questions. Just send us a tweet @EasyAgile or contact us if you’re not sure about what user story mapping is, how to do it, or how it could help your team.