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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.

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Journey mapping 101.

December 9, 2018 2018-12-09

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Journey maps are a common UX tool. They come in all shapes, sizes, and formats. Depending on the context, they can be used in a variety of ways. This article covers the basics: what a journey map is (and is not), related terminology, common variations, and how we can use journey maps.

In This Article:

Definition of a journey map, key components of a journey map, journey-map variations, why use journey maps.

Definition: A journey map is a visualization of the process that a person goes through in order to accomplish a goal.

In its most basic form, journey mapping starts by compiling a series of user actions into a timeline. Next, the timeline is fleshed out with user thoughts and emotions in order to create a narrative. This narrative is condensed and polished, ultimately leading to a visualization.

The terms ‘user journey map’ and ‘customer journey map’ can be used interchangeably. Both reference a visualization of a person using your product or service.

While the argument can be made that the term ‘customer’ does a disservice to the method (because, especially for certain business-to-business products, not all of end users are technically customers, i.e., product buyers), alignment on what you call the map is far less important than alignment on the content within the map.

Journey maps come in all shapes and sizes. Regardless of how they look, journey maps have the following 5 key elements in common:

Scenario + Expectations

Journey phases, actions, mindsets, and emotions, opportunities.

The actor is the persona or user who experiences the journey. The actor is who the journey map is about — a point of view. Actors usually align with personas and their actions in the map are rooted in data.

Provide one point of view per map in order to build a strong, clear narrative. For example, a university might choose either a student or a faculty member as actor — each would result in different journeys. (To capture both viewpoints, the university will need to build two separate maps, one for each of the two user types.)

The scenario describes the situation that the journey map addresses and is associated with an actor’s goal or need and specific expectations. For example, one scenario could be switching mobile plans to save money, and expectations for it include to easily find all the information needed to make a decision.

Scenarios can be real (for existing products and services) or anticipated — for products that are yet in the design stage.

Journey maps are best for scenarios that involve a sequence of events (such as shopping or taking a trip), describe a process (thus involve a set of transitions over time), or might involve multiple channels .

Journey phases are the different high-level stages in the journey. They provide organization for the rest of the information in the journey map (actions, thoughts, and emotions). The stages will vary from scenario to scenario; each organization will usually have data to help it determine what these phases are for a given scenario.

Here are some examples:

• For an ecommerce scenario (like buying Bluetooth speakers), the stages can be discover, try, buy, use, seek support.
• For big (or luxury) purchases (like buying a car), the stages can be engagement, education, research, evaluation, justification.
• For a business-to-business scenario (like rolling out an internal tool), the stages could be purchase, adoption, retention, expansion, advocacy.

These are behaviors, thoughts, and feelings the actor has throughout the journey and that are mapped within each of the journey phases.

Actions are the actual behaviors and steps taken by users. This component is not meant to be a granular step-by-step log of every discrete interaction. Rather, it is a narrative of the steps the actor takes during that phase.

Mindsets correspond to users’ thoughts, questions, motivations, and information needs at different stages in the journey. Ideally, these are customer verbatims from research.

Emotions are plotted as single line across the journey phases, literally signaling the emotional “ups” and “downs” of the experience. Think of this line as a contextual layer of emotion that tells us where the user is delighted versus frustrated.

Opportunities (along with additional context such as ownership and metrics) are insights gained from mapping; they speak to how the user experience can be optimized. Insights and opportunities help the team draw knowledge from the map:

• What needs to be done with this knowledge?
• Who owns what change?
• Where are the biggest opportunities?
• How are we going to measure improvements we implement?

There are several concepts closely related and thus easily confused with journey maps.

It is important to note that this section is only meant to help your personal understanding and clarification of these terms. It is not advised to debate or attempt to shift a whole organization’s language to abide by the definitions stated here. Instead, use these definitions to guide you towards aspects of another method that your team has not previously considered.

Journey Map vs. Experience Map

Think of an experience map as a parent to a journey map. A journey map has a specific actor (a singular customer or user of a product) and specific scenario (of a product or service), while an experience map is broader on both accounts — a generic human undergoing a general human experience.

The experience map is agnostic of a specific business or product. It’s used for understanding a general human behavior; in contrast, a customer journey map is specific and focused on a particular business or product.

For example, imagine the world before the ridesharing market existed (Uber, Lyft, Bird, or Limebike, to name a few). If we were to create an experience map of how a person gets from one place to another, the map would likely include walking, biking, driving, riding with a friend, public transportation, or calling a taxi. Using that experience map we could then isolate pain points: unknown fares, bad weather, unpredictable timing, paying in cash, and so on. Using these pain points, we would then create a future journey map for specific product: how does a particular type of user call a car using the Lyft app?

Journey Map vs. Service Blueprint

If journey maps are the children to experience maps, then service blueprints are the grandchildren. They visualize the relationships between different service components (such as people or processes) at various touchpoints in a specific customer journey.

Think of service blueprints as a part two to customer journey maps. They are extensions of journey maps, but instead of being focused on the user (and taking the user’s viewpoint), they are focused on the business (and take its perspective).

For the Lyft scenario above, we would take the journey map and expand it with what Lyft does internally to support that customer journey. The blueprint could include matching the user to a driver, contacting the driver, calculating fares, and so on.

Journey Map vs. User Story Map

User stories are used in Agile to plan features or functionalities. Each feature is condensed down to a deliberately brief description from a user’s point of view; the description focuses on what the user wants to do, and how that feature will help. The typical format of a user story is a single sentence: “As a [type of user], I want to [goal], so that [benefit].” For example, “As a checking account holder, I want to deposit checks with my mobile device, so that I don’t have to go to the bank.”

A user story map is a visual version of a user story. For example, take the user story above (“As a checking account holder, I want to deposit checks with my mobile device, so that I don’t have to go to the bank.”) and imagine writing out the different steps that the team plans for the user to take when using that functionality. These steps could be: logging in, beginning deposit, taking picture of check, and entering transaction details. For each step, we can document required features: enabling camera access, scanning check and auto filling numbers, and authorizing signature. In a user story map, these features are written on sticky notes, then arranged based on the product release that each functionality will be added to.

While, at a glance, a user story map may look like a journey map, journey maps are meant for discovery and understanding (think big picture), while user story maps are for planning and implementation (think little picture).

Although a journey map and user story map may contain some of the same pieces, they are used at different points of the process. For example, imagine our journey map for Lyft indicated that a pain point appeared when the user was in a large group. To address it, the team may introduce a multicar-call option. We could create a user story map to break this feature (multicar call) into smaller pieces, so a product-development team could plan release cycles and corresponding tasks.

The benefits of journey maps (and most other UX mappings ) are two-fold. First, the process of creating a map forces conversation and an aligned mental model for the whole team. Fragmented understanding is a widespread problem in organizations because success metrics are siloed; it is no one’s responsibility to look at the entire experience from the user’s standpoint. This shared vision is a critical goal of journey mapping, because, without it, agreement on how to improve customer experience would never take place.

Second, the shared artifact resulting from the mapping can be used to communicate an understanding of your user or service to all involved. Journey maps are effective mechanisms for conveying information in a way that is memorable, concise, and that creates a shared vision. The maps can also become the basis for decision making as the team moves forward.

Journey mapping is a process that provides a holistic view of the customer experience by uncovering moments of both frustration and delight throughout a series of interactions. Done successfully, it reveals opportunities to address customers’ pain points, alleviate fragmentation, and, ultimately, create a better experience for your users.

Additional articles are available, discussing: 

• When to create customer journey maps
• The 5-step process
• Journey mapping in real life

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User Journey

Relevant templates

A user journey is the path a person takes when interacting with a product or service, from initial engagement to the desired outcome. It's a critical aspect of user experience design and optimization.

Meaning of User Journey in Agile and Why It's Useful

In the realm of Agile development , the concept of a User Journey takes on a particular significance. A user journey in Agile refers to the path a user follows while interacting with a product or system, emphasizing their experiences, interactions, and emotions at each stage of the journey.

It serves as a valuable tool for Agile teams as they work to deliver customer-centric solutions efficiently. Let's delve into why user journeys are useful in Agile methodologies.

Understanding User Needs

One of the core principles of Agile development is prioritizing customer needs and delivering value to them. By mapping out user journeys, Agile teams gain deeper insights into how users engage with a product or system. 

This understanding helps identify pain points, user preferences, and opportunities for improvement.

Aligning Development with User-Centric Goals

User journeys provide a clear visual representation of the user's path, enabling Agile teams to align their development efforts with user-centric goals. When everyone on the team has a shared understanding of the user's perspective, it becomes easier to make decisions that prioritize features and improvements that matter most to users.

Enhancing User Stories and Features

In Agile, user stories and features are the building blocks of development. User journeys complement these by providing a broader context. They help in breaking down user stories into smaller, actionable tasks and ensure that the team remains focused on delivering features that contribute to a seamless user experience.

User Journey vs. User Flow

While user journeys and user flows are related concepts, they serve different purposes in Agile development.

A user journey is a high-level view of the user's interactions and experiences throughout their engagement with a product or system. It focuses on the user's emotions, goals, and key touchpoints.

User flows, on the other hand, are more detailed and specific. They outline the precise steps a user takes to complete a particular task or achieve a specific goal within the product or system. User flows are often used to design and optimize individual processes, such as a sign-up process or a purchase flow.

User Journey Examples

Let's explore a few examples of user journeys to illustrate their practical application:

E-commerce User Journey

Goal: Purchase a product online

• User lands on the e-commerce website.
• User searches for a product or browses categories.
• User selects a product and adds it to the cart.
• User proceeds to the checkout process.
• User provides shipping and payment information.
• User reviews the order and confirms the purchase.
• User receives an order confirmation.

Social Media User Journey

Goal: Share a post on a social media platform

• User logs into the social media platform.
• User navigates to the "Create Post" or "Share" option.
• User types or uploads content.
• User adds tags or mentions other users (if desired).
• User selects the audience (public, friends, etc.).
• User clicks "Post" to share the content.

How Usersnap Templates Can Help with User Journey Mapping

User journey mapping often involves visual representations and collaboration among team members. Usersnap offers templates and tools that streamline this process in Agile development.

Collaborative Features

Usersnap's collaboration features allow Agile teams to work together in real time on user journey maps. Team members can add comments, annotations, and feedback directly to the maps, facilitating communication and decision-making.

Feedback Collection

Usersnap's feedback widgets can be embedded in the product or system, enabling users to provide feedback at specific touchpoints in their journey. This feedback is invaluable for Agile teams looking to improve the user experience continuously.

In conclusion, user journeys are a fundamental concept in Agile development, enabling teams to gain insights into user experiences, align development efforts with user-centric goals, and enhance user stories and features. 

When used in conjunction with tools like Usersnap, the process becomes even more efficient, collaborative, and user-focused, ultimately leading to the creation of products and systems that delight users and drive success.

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• User Stories

User stories with examples and a template

User stories are development tasks often expressed as “persona + need + purpose.” 

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Summary:  A user story is an informal, general explanation of a software feature written from the perspective of the end user. Its purpose is to articulate how a software feature will provide value to the customer.

It's tempting to think that user stories are, simply put, software system requirements. But they're not. 

A key component of agile software development is putting people first, and a user story puts end users at the center of the conversation. These stories use non-technical language to provide context for the development team and their efforts. After reading a user story, the team knows why they are building, what they're building, and what value it creates. 

User stories are one of the core components of an agile program. They help provide a user-focused framework for daily work — which drives collaboration, creativity, and a better product overall.

What are agile user stories?

A user story is the smallest unit of work in an agile framework. It’s an end goal, not a feature, expressed from the software user’s perspective.

A user story is an informal, general explanation of a software feature written from the perspective of the end user or customer. 

The purpose of a user story is to articulate how a piece of work will deliver a particular value back to the customer. Note that "customers" don't have to be external end users in the traditional sense, they can also be internal customers or colleagues within your organization who depend on your team.

User stories are a few sentences in simple language that outline the desired outcome. They don't go into detail. Requirements are added later, once agreed upon by the team.

Stories fit neatly into agile frameworks like scrum and kanban . In scrum, user stories are added to sprints and “burned down” over the duration of the sprint. Kanban teams pull user stories into their backlog and run them through their workflow. It’s this work on user stories that help scrum teams get better at estimation and sprint planning, leading to more accurate forecasting and greater agility. Thanks to stories, kanban teams learn how to manage work-in-progress (WIP) and can further refine their workflows.

User stories are also the building blocks of larger agile frameworks like epics and initiatives. Epics are large work items broken down into a set of stories, and multiple epics comprise an initiative. These larger structures ensure that the day-to-day work of the development team (on stores) contributes to the organizational goals built into epics and initiatives.

Learn more about epics and initiatives

Why create user stories?

For development teams new to agile, user stories sometimes seem like an added step. Why not just break the big project ( the epic ) into a series of steps and get on with it? But stories give the team important context and associate tasks with the value those tasks bring.

User stories serve a number of key benefits:

• Stories keep the focus on the user. A to-do list keeps the team focused on tasks that need to be checked off, but a collection of stories keeps the team focused on solving problems for real users.  
• Stories enable collaboration. With the end goal defined, the team can work together to decide how best to serve the user and meet that goal.  
• Stories drive creative solutions. Stories encourage the team to think critically and creatively about how to best solve for an end goal.  
• Stories create momentum.  With each passing story, the development team enjoys a small challenge and a small win, driving momentum.  

See how user stories work in Jira Software

Working with user stories

Once a story has been written, it’s time to integrate it into your workflow. Generally a story is written by the product owner, product manager, or program manager and submitted for review.

During a sprint or iteration planning meeting, the team decides what stories they’ll tackle that sprint. Teams now discuss the requirements and functionality that each user story requires. This is an opportunity to get technical and creative in the team’s implementation of the story. Once agreed upon, these requirements are added to the story.

Another common step in this meeting is to score the stories based on their complexity or time to completion. Teams use t-shirt sizes, the Fibonacci sequence, or planning poker to make proper estimations. A story should be sized to complete in one sprint, so as the team specs each story, they make sure to break up stories that will go over that completion horizon.  

How to write user stories

Consider the following when writing user stories:

• Definition of “done” — The story is generally “done” when the user can complete the outlined task, but make sure to define what that is.  
• Outline subtasks or tasks — Decide which specific steps need to be completed and who is responsible for each of them.  
• User personas — For whom? If there are multiple end users, consider making multiple stories.  
• Ordered Steps — Write a story for each step in a larger process.  
• Listen to feedback — Talk to your users and capture the problem or need in their words. No need to guess at stories when you can source them from your customers.  
• Time — Time is a touchy subject. Many development teams avoid discussions of time altogether, relying instead on their estimation frameworks. Since stories should be completable in one sprint, stories that might take weeks or months to complete should be broken up into smaller stories or should be considered their own epic.  

Once the user stories are clearly defined, make sure they are visible for the entire team.

User story template and examples

User stories are often expressed in a simple sentence, structured as follows:

“As a [persona], I [want to], [so that].”

Breaking this down: 

• "As a [persona]": Who are we building this for? We’re not just after a job title, we’re after the persona of the person. Max. Our team should have a shared understanding of who Max is. We’ve hopefully interviewed plenty of Max’s. We understand how that person works, how they think and what they feel. We have empathy for Max.
• “Wants to”: Here we’re describing their intent — not the features they use. What is it they’re actually trying to achieve? This statement should be implementation free — if you’re describing any part of the UI and not what the user goal is you're missing the point.
• “So that”: how does their immediate desire to do something this fit into their bigger picture? What’s the overall benefit they’re trying to achieve? What is the big problem that needs solving?

For example, user stories might look like:

• As Max, I want to invite my friends, so we can enjoy this service together.
• As Sascha, I want to organize my work, so I can feel more in control. 
• As a manager, I want to be able to understand my colleagues progress, so I can better report our sucess and failures. 

This structure is not required, but it is helpful for defining done. When that persona can capture their desired value, then the story is complete. We encourage teams to define their own structure, and then to stick to it.

Getting started with agile user stories

User stories describe the why and the what behind the day-to-day work of development team members, often expressed as persona + need + purpose . Understanding their role as the source of truth for what your team is delivering, but also why, is key to a smooth process.

Start by evaluating the next, or most pressing, large project (e.g. an epic). Break it down into smaller user stories, and work with the development team for refinement. Once your stories are out in the wild where the whole team can see them, you’re ready to get to work.

As a self-proclaimed “chaos muppet” I look to agile practices and lean principles to bring order to my everyday. It’s a joy of mine to share these lessons with others through the many articles, talks, and videos I make for Atlassian 

How to create user stories in Jira Software

Discover how teams can use issues to track individual pieces of work that must be completed.

What are story points and how do you estimate them?

An inside look into secrets of agile estimation and story points. Good agile estimation lets product owners optimize for efficiency and impact.

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Creating User Journey Maps: A Guide

User journey maps help you harness empathy to gain valuable insights about your customers and your product.

One of the biggest skills you’ll leverage as a UI/UX designer is your ability to empathize with the people using the products you design. Creating user journey maps can help you harness that empathy and transform it into valuable insights about your customers and product. Let’s take a closer look at what a user journey map is and why it’s an important tool in the UX designer’s toolbox.

What is a user journey map?

A user journey map gives a visual representation of a customer’s experience. This visualization might cover a customer’s entire relationship with a brand or focus on a select experience they might have while interacting with an app or website. No matter the type, user journey maps serve as a useful tool for understanding user needs and pain points and ultimately optimizing user experience (UX). 

Get started in UX: Google UX Design Professional Certificate

Why create user journey maps?

The main job of a UX designer is to make products intuitive, functional, and enjoyable to use. By creating a user journey map, you’re thinking about a product from a potential customer’s point of view. This can help in several ways.

User journey maps foster a user-centric mentality . You’ll focus on how a user might think and feel while using your product, as well as what goals they’re trying to achieve and what obstacles they might face along the way.

User journey maps create a shared vision for your company . This visualization can serve as a point of reference for different team members and stakeholders throughout the product development process. 

User journey maps can uncover blind spots . Taking the time to map out how a user interacts with your product (and how they feel doing so) may reveal design flaws or new opportunities you hadn’t considered. 

Still not convinced? Listen to Michael, an interaction designer at Google, explain the importance of user-centric design.

Types of journey maps

Journey maps can be as unique and creative as the products you’re designing. While there’s not one boilerplate template for a user journey, you will find a few main types of these maps. 

A UX journey map focuses on the user experience of a specific product, typically an app or website. With these types of maps, you can gain insight into how a customer interacts with your software and what they might find helpful or frustrating. This in turn helps you design software that’s simpler and easier to use.

A sales journey map follows the buyer’s journey through its typical stages: awareness, consideration, and decision. Marketing teams can use these maps to evaluate how customers interact with a brand across multiple communication channels to maximize sales.

A customer experience journey map offers a high-level view of a customer-brand relationship across time. A current-state customer journey map focuses on current customer interactions (and how they can be improved). Future-state customer journey maps can drive innovation by imagining new customer experiences. 

Elements of a user journey map

As you begin to map out user journeys, you’ll likely find ways to customize your maps to your particular company, product, and customer base. Search for user maps on the web, and you’ll find a range of creative examples. But take a closer look and you’ll find that many of these maps have a few elements in common.

Persona: What segment of users are you trying to understand (current or target)?

Scenario: What interaction are you trying to map out (real or anticipated)? 

Stages of the journey: What are the high-level phases of the scenario? 

User actions: What actions can the user take in each stage of the journey?

User emotions and thoughts: What is the user’s emotional state as they move through the stages? What are they thinking in each stage?

Opportunities: Where can you improve the UX of your product or connect with your customer in a more effective way?

Internal ownership: Which team or team member will be responsible for enacting these changes?

Read more: 9 Essential Skills for UX Designers

How to create a user journey map

We’ve outlined what a user journey map is, why you might want to create one, and what elements you should include. Now let’s go through the basic steps to create your own user journey map.

1. Define the scope.

Creating a helpful user journey map starts with defining your goals. Are you mapping the journey of a new target user across the entire buyer’s journey? Or are you seeking to make a transaction on an app—transferring money for example—more intuitive? Being clear on your goals now can help give you more relevant insights once your map is complete.  

Read more: What Is Scope Creep? Keeping Your Project Focused

2. Build user personas.

Typically, you’ll want a different map for each unique user type. Not all your customers will have the same needs (or the same ways of going about meeting those needs). Think about who your users are, and create a customer persona for each segment. This often starts with user research. Customer interviews, focus group discussions, surveys, and even prior customer feedback can help you develop these personas and better understand the customer perspective. User personas are sometimes referred to as buyer personas.

3. Define user goals, expectations, and pain points.

Once you have a better idea of who your target user is, spend some time thinking about what they want. What problem do prospective customers have that your product or service can solve? What expectations might they have as they begin their journey? What problems might they face, or what about your product might cause them frustration? How can your product or service meet customer expectations?

4. List out touchpoints and channels.

The term “customer touchpoint” refers to a point of interaction between a user and a product or business. Typical customer touchpoints occur across many different business channels, including websites, social media platforms, apps, ads, or face-to-face communications. Create an inventory of all the customer touchpoints and channels involved in the scenario you’ve previously defined.

5. Map the journey stages.

You’ve gathered the data you need to populate your map, so now it’s time to visualize this information with a customer journey map template. This is where you can get creative. Your map could be as simple as a timeline or as complex as a storyboard that shows visually what happens in each of the journey phases. You could take a low-tech approach with sticky notes on a whiteboard, or go digital with Google Sheets or customer journey mapping tools.

Many common UX tools, including Sketch, Figma, and Adobe XD, offer journey mapping capabilities. You’ll also find a range of dedicated journey mapping tools, such as UXPressia, Smaply, Custellence, or Visual Paradigm. UX research and consulting firm Nielsen Norman Group offers a free template that could also help you get started. 

6. Validate and refine the map.

User journey mapping is only as strong as it is truthful. Validate the map by moving through the user journey yourself. Usability testing, analytics, and reviews from real customers can also help validate that your map reflects the average customer reality. Continue to refine the map as you discover discrepancies.

Other types of UX mapping

The user journey map is among many types of mapping tools UX designers might use throughout the design process. Let’s take a brief look at some of the others that can be used on their own or alongside your journey map.

Service blueprint

A journey map illustrates the customer experience. A service blueprint maps out what goes on behind the scenes to deliver that experience. The former is customer focused, the latter organization focused.

A user flow maps out the path taken by a generic user through a website or app to a successful outcome. These often take the form of a flow chart and are not focused on specific personas. 

Empathy map

This tool helps you gain a deeper understanding of customer actions by mapping out what these users say, think, feel, and do. You may find it helpful to create an empathy map as part of Steps Two and Three above. 

Experience map

This visualization tracks the entire experience of a generic user as they seek to achieve a goal or satisfy a need. These maps typically look at a larger context to evaluate how potential customers solve their problems with or without your product.

Create your user journey map

User journey mapping is an essential part of the UX design process. Enhance your skills with these popular courses on Coursera:

Create a user journey map with a two-hour guided project. Create a User Journey Map in Miro is a hands-on course where you'll build a user journey map for a UX design project that documents the user's actions, emotions, and thoughts while using a product so you can identify opportunities for improvement.

Learn where and how user journey mapping is used in the design process with Google's course Start the UX Design Process: Empathize, Define, and Ideate . You'll craft user stories, develop user journey maps, and more, in 21 hours or less.

Build your UX design knowledge with Google's UX Design Professional Certificate. The popular series includes the class mentioned above, and is aimed at developing the skills you'll need for an entry-level UX design role. Learn how to empathize with users and design a delightful experience. Once completed, you'll earn a shareable certificate and gain access to exclusive career resources such as resume review and interview prep.

Keep reading

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This content has been made available for informational purposes only. Learners are advised to conduct additional research to ensure that courses and other credentials pursued meet their personal, professional, and financial goals.

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How to create an effective user journey map

No matter what you’re working on, the key to customer satisfaction and business growth is understanding your users. A user journey map helps you uncover pain points, explore the touchpoints from their perspective, and learn how to improve your product.

Imagine you just launched a new ecommerce platform. Shoppers fill their carts with products, but they abandon their carts before checkout. With a user journey map, you can pinpoint where the customer experience is going wrong, and how to enable more successful checkouts.

Read on to find out:

• What is a user journey map, and how it captures user flows and customer touchpoints
• Benefits of user journey mapping to refine UX design and reach business goals
• How to make user journey maps in five steps, using FigJam’s user journey map template

What is a user journey map?

Think about the path a user takes to explore your product or website. How would you design the best way to get there? User journey maps (or user experience maps) help team members and stakeholders align on user needs throughout the design process, starting with user research. As you trace users' steps through your user flows, notice: Where do users get lost, backtrack, or drop off?

User journey maps help you flag pain points and churn, so your team can see where the user experience may be confusing or frustrating for your audience. Then you can use your map to identify key customer touchpoints and find opportunities for optimization.

How to read a user journey map

Most user journey maps are flowcharts or grids showing the user experience from end to end. Consider this real-life journey map example of a freelancing app from Figma's design community. The journey starts with a buyer persona needing freelance services, and a freelancer looking for a gig. Ideally, the journey ends with service delivery and payment—but customer pain points could interrupt the flow.

Start your user journey map with FigJam

5 key user journey map phases.

Take a look at another Figma community user journey template , which uses a simple grid. Columns capture the five key stages of the user journey: awareness, consideration, decision, purchase, and retention (see below). Rows show customer experiences across these stages—their thoughts, feelings, and pain points. These experiences are rated as good, neutral, and bad.

To see how this works, consider a practical example. Suppose a new pet parent wants to learn how to train their puppy and discovers your dog-training app. Here's how you might map out the five key user journey stages:

• Awareness. The user sees a puppy-training video on social media with a link to your product website. They're intrigued—a positive experience.
• Consideration. The user visits your product website to preview your app. If they can't find a video preview easily, this could be a neutral or negative experience.
• Decision. The user clicks on a link to the app store and reads reviews of your app and compares it to others. They might think your app reviews are good, but your price is high—a negative or neutral experience.
• Purchase. The user buys your app and completes the onboarding process. If this process is smooth, it's a positive experience. If not, the customer experience could turn negative at this point.
• Retention. The user receives follow-up emails featuring premium puppy-training services or special offers. Depending on their perception of these emails, the experience can range from good (helpful support) to bad (too much spam).

2 types of user journey maps—and when to use them

User journey maps are helpful across the product design and development process, especially at two crucial moments: during product development and for UX troubleshooting. These scenarios call for different user journey maps: current-state and future-state.

Current-state user journey maps

A current-state user journey map shows existing customer interactions with your product. It gives you a snapshot of what's happening, and pinpoints how to enhance the user experience.

Take the puppy training app, for example. A current-state customer journey map might reveal that users are abandoning their shopping carts before making in-app purchases. Look at it from your customers' point of view: Maybe they aren't convinced their credit cards will be secure or the shipping address workflow takes too long. These pain points show where you might tweak functionality to boost user experience and build customer loyalty.

Future-state user journey maps

A future-state user journey map is like a vision board : it shows the ideal customer journey, supported by exceptional customer experiences. Sketch out your best guesses about user behavior on an ideal journey, then put them to the test with usability testing. Once you've identified your north star, you can explore new product or site features that will optimize user experience.

How to make a user journey map in 5 steps

To start user journey mapping, follow this step-by-step guide.

Step 1: Define user personas and goals.

Gather user research and data like demographics, psychographics, and shopping behavior to create detailed customer personas representing your target audience.  In your dog-training app example, one key demographic may be parents. What’s their goal? It isn't necessarily "hire a puppy trainer"—it could be "teach kids how to interact with a puppy."

Step 2: Identify customer touch points.

Locate the points along the user journey where the user encounters or interacts with your product. In the dog training app example, touchpoints might include social media videos, app website, app store category search (e.g., pets), app reviews, app store checkout, in-app onboarding, and app customer support.

Step 3: Visualize journey phases.

Create a visual representation of user journey phases across key touchpoints with user flow diagrams , flowcharts , or storyboards .

Step 4: Capture user actions and responses.

For each journey stage, capture the user story: at this juncture, what are they doing, thinking, and feeling ? This could be simple, such as: "Potential customer feels frustrated when the product image takes too long to load."

Step 5: Validate and iterate.

Finally, show your map to real users. Get honest feedback about what works and what doesn’t with user testing , website metrics , or surveys . To use the dog-training app example, you might ask users: Are they interested in subscribing to premium how-to video content by a professional dog trainer? Apply user feedback to refine your map and ensure it reflects customer needs.

Jumpstart your user journey map with FigJam

Lead your team's user journey mapping effort with FigJam, the online collaborative whiteboard for brainstorming, designing, and idea-sharing. Choose a user journey map template from Figma's design community as your guide. With Figma's drag-and-drop design features, you can quickly produce your own professional, presentation-ready user journey map.

Pro tip: Use a service blueprint template to capture behind-the-scenes processes that support the user journey, bridging the gap between user experience and service delivery.

Ready to improve UX with user journey mapping?

User Journey Guide: From Definition to Delightful Experiences

The user journey is a critical aspect of creating exceptional user experiences. It involves mapping a user's path while interacting with your product or service.

Understanding this journey empowers you to identify pain points, delight your users, and ultimately achieve your business goals. In this blog post, we'll delve into the definition of a user journey, explore different types, learn how to create one, discover valuable tools and software, and highlight best practices that combine practicality with creativity.

Definition of a User Journey: Navigating the Path to Success

The user journey is a step-by-step visualization of a user's interactions with your product or service. It encompasses their emotions, thoughts, and actions, providing a holistic view of their experience. A well-crafted user journey helps you empathize with users and make informed decisions that lead to remarkable user experiences.

Different Types of User Journeys: Explore the Possibilities

There are several types of user journeys, each tailored to specific needs:

Product Purchase Journey : Maps a user's stages while purchasing, from initial awareness to post-purchase support.

App Onboarding Journey : Focuses on introducing users to an app's key features and benefits, guiding them towards a seamless onboarding process.

Website Navigation Journey : Illustrates the user's path while navigating a website, identifying potential pain points and areas for improvement.

Creating a User Journey: Empathy in Action

Designing a user journey is crucial to user-centered design and product development. It enables you to empathize with your users, understand their needs, and ultimately create a product or service that resonates with them. Here, we'll delve deeper into the steps in creating a user journey and how empathy plays a central role.

Step 1 Research and Data Collection:

Empathy begins with understanding your users on a profound level. This step involves gathering as much relevant data as possible. It can include:

• User Feedback: Engage with your current users through interviews, surveys, and feedback sessions to understand their pain points, preferences, and expectations.
• Behavioral Data: Analyze user behavior data, such as website interactions, app usage patterns, and purchase histories, to identify trends and pain points.
• Competitor Analysis: Study your competitors to learn from their successes and failures and identify market gaps.

Empathy comes into play by genuinely listening to your users, putting yourself in their shoes, and seeking to comprehend their motivations and challenges.

Step 2 Personas:

With the data you've collected, you can develop user personas. These are fictional representations of different segments of your target audience. Each persona should have a name, a background story, goals, challenges, and personality traits. This step is vital for humanizing your users and making them more relatable to your team.

Empathy is the cornerstone here, as you need to empathize with the personas you create. Understanding their unique perspectives and needs will help you design solutions that cater to a wide range of users.

Step 3 Mapping the Journey:

The core of the user journey is mapping out the user's steps when interacting with your product or service. For each persona, consider:

• Actions: What specific actions do they take? (e.g., signing up, browsing, purchasing)
• Thoughts: What thoughts and questions might go through their minds at each stage?
• Emotions: How do they feel during the journey? Are they excited, frustrated, or confused?

This mapping exercise is where empathy truly shines. By understanding the emotions and thoughts of your users at different stages, you can identify pain points and opportunities for improvement. You can also see where moments of delight can be introduced.

Visual Representation: Use creative visualizations to communicate the user journey effectively to your team, stakeholders, and collaborators. Some popular methods include:

• Flowcharts: Using interconnected steps, visualize the user's path through your product or service.
• Storyboards: Create a visual narrative that sequentially illustrates the user's journey, highlighting key touchpoints.
• Empathy Maps: Focus on the user's feelings, thoughts, pain points, and gains at each stage.

Empathy is crucial in this step because it helps you effectively convey the emotional aspects of the user journey. By visually representing the user's emotions and experiences, you can foster a more profound understanding among your team members.

In conclusion, creating a user journey is a process that revolves around empathy. It's about stepping into the shoes of your users, understanding their needs, emotions, and pain points, and using this understanding to design a product or service that genuinely resonates with them. By following these steps and keeping empathy at the forefront, you can create user journeys that lead to exceptional user experiences.

Tools and Software for User Journey Mapping: Efficiency Meets Creativity

• Miro : A collaborative online whiteboard platform perfect for creating user journey maps with team members.
• Lucidchart : Ideal for designing flowcharts and diagrams that visually represent user interactions.
• UserTesting : A user research platform that provides honest user feedback, essential for refining the user journey.

Best Practices for Crafting a User Journey: The Art of Empowering Users

• Stay Agile : Be open to continuous iteration based on user feedback and changing user needs.
• Embrace Empathy : Put yourself in your users' shoes to fully understand their pain points and aspirations.
• Consistency Matters : Ensure consistency across all touchpoints to deliver a seamless and delightful user experience.
• Collaborate : Involve cross-functional teams in the user journey creation process to gain diverse perspectives.

Conclusion:

A well-crafted user journey is a powerful tool that propels your product or service toward success. By defining user journey types, creating them with empathy , leveraging efficient tools, and following best practices, you delightfully empower users to navigate your offerings.

Balancing practicality with creativity allows you to envision and deliver experiences that leave a lasting positive impact on your users. So, dive into the world of user journey mapping and unlock the true potential of your product or service!

Agile user stories

Table of Contents

What is a user story in agile.

Understanding what the end-user wants is key to improving and developing your business. Without this information, it’s hard to attract customers — especially if your competitors offer something that meets their needs.

This is where user stories can help.

A user story in Agile is a simple, high-level description of a software feature from the user’s experience. It defines what a user needs from your business, which helps you prioritize work and improve customer value.

User stories are a common tool used in Agile methodologies , allowing development teams work in iterations, focusing on delivering small, valuable pieces of functionality to users as quickly as possible.

A user story typically follows the following format:

"As a [type of user], I want [goal or objective] so that I [benefit or outcome]."

For example, a user story for a project management tool could be:

"As a project manager, I want to create and assign tasks to team members so that I can track  project progress and ensure work is completed on time."

An Agile user story example

Imagine that you’re a website designer for a clothing e-commerce website. To encourage potential consumers to make a purchase, you need to design a website that meets the needs and wants of your customers.

But what exactly does that look like for your target audience?

To completely understand what consumers want from your website, you do some research to find out what your customers want (more on this later), and you create the following user stories:

"As a customer with limited funds, I want to filter search results by price range to find products that fit my budget easily."

“As a customer interested in the latest trends, I want to filter products based on the latest additions to the website.”

“As a customer that wants a speedy buying process, I want to use a website that’s easy to navigate and quick to make a purchase.”

With these user stories in place, you have a deeper understanding of what your customers want from their experience on your website. This knowledge puts you in a stronger position to create a website that meets their needs and provides them with the best possible experience.

Why create Agile user stories?

User stories ensure that the voice of the end-user is heard, and the resulting product or service is built with their needs in mind. Here are some of the key benefits of creating Agile user stories in more detail:

To understand what end-users want

Agile user stories are from the perspective of the end user, not the development team. This puts your focus on the user’s needs and goals. As a result, you can provide them with the features and functionalities they need to get the best user experience.

To effectively prioritize work

When you know what your customers are looking for, you can prioritize your work accordingly. In other words, you can focus on the most critical requirements first, allowing you to deliver the most value in the shortest amount of time.

To be more flexible

Agile user stories are fluid and can quickly adapt as requirements change. This flexibility allows for a more iterative approach to the software development process, allowing the Agile team to add more customer value.

To make accurate estimations

User stories can be estimated and are usually associated with story points, which help in understanding the effort required to develop a feature. This aids in planning and resource allocation.

What are the 3 parts of a user story?

A typical Agile user story format consists of the following three areas:

Who needs the functionality?

What do they want?

Why do they need it?

Let’s explore these areas in more detail.

Who is the end-user?

The first part of a user story involves describing who the end user is. It could be a customer, a website visitor, an admin user, or any other type of user or stakeholder.

What does the end-user want?

A statement of the user's goal or objective in using the software system. For example, if the user story is for an e-commerce website, they might want to search for products by keyword.

Why do they want it?

This refers to the benefit or outcome the user gets from the feature or functionality. For an e-commerce website, it might be quickly finding the products they’re looking for, making the shopping experience more efficient.

How to write user stories in Agile

Now that we know the ins and outs of user stories in an Agile workflow, let’s walk through the process of writing your own.

For this step-by-step guide, we’ll use Agile software development as an example.

1. Identify the end-user

The first step is to identify the end-user. If you’re not sure who your end-user is, don’t worry. There are a few different ways to tackle this process.

Let’s review some examples:

Conduct customer research

Reach out to your existing customers (if you don’t have customers yet, use potential customers) to learn more about who they are. To do this, you could run an online survey, ask for feedback on your social media channels, or email them directly, asking for specific information.

Review existing customer data

If you already have existing customers, explore the data you have. If there’s any information about their demographics (such as age, location, job, etc.), use this information to paint a picture of your end-user.

Analyze your competitors

If you don’t have existing customers to review, take a look at who your competitors are targeting. This will give you a good indication of who you should target and who your end-users will be. Use our Competitive Analysis Template to help you manage this process.

To make sure you have a clear picture of your end-user, consider using our User Persona Template to guide you. With this template, you can collect all your data about your end-users in a single location and continually update it as new information comes to light.

2. Define the end-user's goal or objective

Now that you know who your target user is, you need to find out what they want from your software — including the specific features.

To do this, you can follow the activities outlined in the previous section. Talk to your customers to find out what they want, analyze your existing data, and review what your competitors are doing and how their audience feels about it.

You can also use our Customer Problem Statement Template to identify customer pain points. Understanding customer challenges will help you determine how your software can solve these issues and provide a better user experience.

3. Describe the end-user’s desired outcome

Next, you need to outline the benefit the end-user will get from using this feature. To do this, think about the goal you’ve just outlined and ask yourself the following question:

What is the reasoning behind this goal?

For example, if the end-user wants a search bar on your website, how will this benefit them? Will it make the experience more efficient? Will it make it easier for them to find what they’re looking for?

This is how your feature benefits the end-user, which is a key part of your Agile story. When you’ve finalized this information, you’re ready to create a full Agile story — which leads us nicely to the next section.

4. Create the user story

With the three main elements under your belt, you can now create the user story.

As mentioned, user stories are concise. There’s no room for jargon, so the language must be simple and provide a clear picture of what the user requires.

Here’s the structure we outlined previously:

"As a [user], I want [goal/objective], so that [benefit/outcome]."

You can also use our User Story Map Template to plot your ideas. The template helps you visualize the customer journey and outline the tasks you need to accomplish to improve the customer experience.

5. Collaborate with the Agile development team and stakeholders

Although the product owner is often in charge of writing the user story, some collaboration between teams is necessary.

The product owner, the development team, and other stakeholders need to review the user stories to make sure they’re accurate and that everyone’s on the same page. At the end of this process, you should have user stories that are clear, concise, and accurate.

It’s also a chance to define your acceptance criteria, which is a set of conditions that must be met for a user story to be complete. With acceptance criteria in place, everyone knows when a new feature or functionality is ready for release.

To work together as effectively as possible, it helps to have a collaboration tool in place.

With Miro, your entire team can collaborate virtually and in person in one shared space. You can add your user stories to the workspace, share access with your team, and even integrate Jira cards to easily keep track of work being done.

6. Prioritize the user stories in the product backlog

Once you have a list of user stories, you’ll need to add them to the product backlog.

The product backlog is a prioritized list of all the features that need to be developed for a product. This is where you’ll organize and prioritize user stories based on the value they deliver to the end user. Check out our Product Backlog Template to find out more about how it works.

After adding the stories to the backlog, you’ll run a sprint planning meeting with your Agile team to decide which user stories to add to the upcoming sprint.

Here are some of the areas to consider when prioritizing user stories:

Identify quick wins that add the most value

If one of your user stories outlines a new and simple feature that could deliver a high level of value to the end user, this should be your priority. Ultimately, you want to deliver the most value possible with the least amount of work. That way, the end-user has a better experience, and you have more resources available to focus on other areas of software development.

Review team capacity for the upcoming sprints

Before deciding which user stories to prioritize, it’s important to consider how much time the work will take and how much capacity the development team has. It’s no use prioritizing user stories that the development team simply won’t have the time or resources to complete. To overcome this hurdle, talk to the development team beforehand to figure out what’s realistic.

Use a priority matrix

If you’re struggling to figure out which user stories should take priority in an upcoming sprint, use a priority matrix. This will help you compare the level of work required and the impact it’ll have. We have a variety of prioritization templates that’ll help you in this situation.

Use Miro to create Agile user stories

User stories are a small but essential part of an Agile framework. They encourage you to look at your software from the perspective of the end-user, which helps you deliver features and functionalities that improve the user experience.

To start creating user stories, use our User Story Map Template . Plot your ideas, outline your tasks, and easily track your progress as you make improvements to your software.

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User Story Mapping

User story mapping definition.

User Story Mapping is a visual exercise used in Agile Product Management and development to define the functionality of a product or feature based on the user’s journey. It offers a holistic view of the user experience, ensuring that teams have a shared understanding and a prioritized plan.

What is User Story Mapping?

User Story Mapping arranges user stories on a board, visually representing how users interact with a product. This approach prioritizes user stories based on user needs and organizes them into a cohesive narrative, making it easier for teams to understand, discuss, and implement features. Story Mapping enhances clarity, collaboration, and alignment within development teams by focusing on the user’s perspective.

User Story Mapping has its roots deep in the Agile world, with Jeff Patton , a recognized figure in the Agile community, playing a significant role in its popularization. He emphasized the importance of visualizing user stories to ensure every stakeholder is aligned with the product vision.

The Essence and Benefits of Story Mapping

What is the Story Mapping technique in Agile? In Agile development, Story Mapping is essential to create a visual representation of the product backlog. Instead of a flat list, user stories are organized in a map, ensuring all features align with the user’s journey and the product’s goals. The map offers a two-dimensional view: the vertical axis indicates priority (with high-priority items at the top), and the horizontal axis represents the user journey.

User Story Mapping Examples

E-commerce Site : Imagine mapping an e-commerce platform. The horizontal axis might follow a user’s journey from landing on the homepage, browsing products, adding items to the cart, checking out, and receiving post-purchase support. The vertical axis would prioritize critical functionalities like product search, payment processing, and order tracking.

Mobile Banking App : For a banking app, the horizontal flow might include user onboarding, viewing account details, making transfers, paying bills, and contacting customer support. Essential features like security measures and payment confirmations would be prioritized vertically.

Differentiating Terms and Techniques

What is the difference between roadmap and User Story Mapping? While both tools help in product planning, a roadmap provides a high-level view of the product’s direction over time, emphasizing milestones and objectives. In contrast, a User Story Map offers a granular look at the user journey, detailing functionalities and features.

What is the difference between an Epic and a User Story Map? An Epic is a large chunk of work that can be broken down into smaller user stories . A user story map, however, arranges these stories (and potentially multiple epics) in a visual format based on user experience, ensuring all stories align coherently with the user’s needs.

Parts and Participants in Story Mapping

What are the parts of a User story map? The primary components include:

• User Activities : High-level tasks users want to accomplish.
• User Tasks : Specific actions users take to complete an activity.
• User Stories : Detailed descriptions of functionalities or features supporting the tasks.

Who participates in user story mapping?

A diverse group, including product managers, developers, designers, and stakeholders , typically engage in the process. This collective participation ensures a holistic understanding and comprehensive coverage of user needs.

Incorporating Feedback into the User Story Map

It’s vital to iteratively update the user story map based on feedback from user testing, stakeholder reviews, and team discussions. This adaptability ensures the product remains aligned with user needs and business objectives, making the map a living document.

In Conclusion

User Story Mapping is a transformative tool in Agile Product Development, bridging the gap between user needs and product functionality. Providing a visual and organized representation of the user’s journey fosters collaboration, clarity, and effective prioritization, ensuring the product resonates with its target audience.

Related Terms

• SMART Goal Setting
• Moscow Prioritization
• Stakeholders Analysis
• Product Design
• Minimum Viable Product (MVP)
• Customer Acquisition Cost (CAC)

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User Stories in Agile - How To Write With Examples

User stories play a crucial role in Agile methodologies, serving as the smallest unit of work and expressing the end goals from the user's perspective. They bridge the gap between technical requirements and the needs of the end-users, making them an essential tool in product development.

This article will guide you through crafting compelling user stories, providing practical examples to inspire your Agile team. We'll explore steps to create user stories, from outlining acceptance criteria to investing in their development, ensuring that your product meets the needs of its users.

What are user stories?

User stories are a fundamental building block in Agile methodologies, providing a simple and straightforward way to describe a software feature from an end user's perspective. They focus on the value that the user will gain from the feature rather than getting bogged down in technical details.

A user story is typically expressed in a simple sentence, following the format: "As a [type of user], I want [an action] so that [a benefit/a value]." This helps to keep the focus on the user's needs and encourages the team to consider the functionality from the user's perspective.

The INVEST principle is a widely accepted set of criteria for writing good user stories:

• Independent: It must be independent; it shouldn't rely on another story.
• Negotiable: You can always rewrite and change user stories until they become part of an iteration.
• Valuable: A user story must offer value to an end user.
• Estimable: At any time, you must be able to evaluate the size of a user story.
• Small: Don't make your user story big; otherwise, it will be impossible to plan, task, and prioritize.
• Testable: The user story should offer the necessary information to make test development possible.

Purpose of User Stories

User stories serve multiple purposes in Agile development as a vital tool for ensuring that the end product aligns with the user's needs and expectations. The key purposes they serve are:

• Communication and Understanding: User stories facilitate communication between the development team and stakeholders. They help to ensure everyone has a clear, shared understanding of what is to be achieved and why it matters.
• Focus on User Value: By framing features in the context of user needs, user stories ensure that the project stays focused on delivering real value to the end user.
• Simplicity: User stories are designed to be simple and concise, cutting through non-technical language to express what the user wants in plain language.
• Prioritization and Planning: User stories can help prioritize features based on their value to the user. They also assist in planning by providing a clear view of what needs to be done.
• Flexibility: User stories are flexible. They can be rewritten or split into smaller stories as needed, enabling the team to adapt to changes quickly.
• Testability: With clear criteria defined, user stories provide an excellent basis for creating test cases. They help ensure the resulting feature works as intended and meets the user's needs.

Who Creates User Stories in Agile?

In Agile development, user stories are typically created by the product owner . He is responsible for understanding the needs of the end users, stakeholders, and the business and translating these into user stories that the development team can work on.

However, it's important to note that while the product owner is primarily responsible for creating user stories, this is often a collaborative effort. The development team, stakeholders, and sometimes even the users themselves can contribute to creating user stories.

Who Accepts User Stories in Agile?

The development team presents the completed work to the product owner during the sprint review. At this point, the product owner reviews the work against the defined acceptance criteria. The product owner accepts the user story workflow if the work meets these criteria. If it doesn't, the story may be moved back to the product backlog for further work in a future sprint.

How to Write User Stories?

Writing user stories is a key part of Agile development. Here are the steps you can follow to create effective user stories:

• Understand Your User: Start by identifying and understanding your user. Create personas that represent different user types for your product or service.
• Define What They Want to Do: List the tasks they want to accomplish with your product or service for each persona.
• Write the User Story: Use the standard format: "As a [type of user], I want [an action] so that [a benefit/a reason]." This keeps the focus on the user role, their needs, and the value they get.
• Define Acceptance Criteria: You must meet these conditions to complete the story. They offer clear guidance on what is expected from the feature and how it should behave.
• Prioritize Your User Stories: Some stories have different importance. Prioritize them based on their value to the user and business and the feasibility of implementation.

A typical user story includes:

• Title: A short, descriptive name for the story.
• Description: The user story itself is written in the standard format.
• Acceptance Criteria: Specific conditions must be met to complete the story.
• Story Points: An estimate of the effort required to complete the story. This is typically determined using Planning Poker, where team members make estimates using cards with values representing complexity and effort.

User Story Structure

The recommended structure for writing user stories follows the Role-Feature-Reason format. This is a simple yet effective way to frame the functionality and value of a feature from a user's perspective.

This refers to the type of user who will use the feature. It could be a specific user persona or role within your user base.

This is the action or capability that the user wants to perform or have. It should be described in terms of what the user wants, not system functionality.

This is the benefit or value that the user will get from the feature. It explains why users want this feature and what they hope to achieve.

User Story Syntax

The syntax for writing a user story in Agile development typically follows the formula: "As a [type of user], I want [some goal] so that [some reason]." This structure helps to keep the focus on the user and their needs. Let's break down each part:

"As a [type of user]": This segment represents the person or role using the feature. It's important to specify this to clarify who the functionality is being built for. For example, "As an administrator..."

"I want [some goal]": This part expresses the user's action or what they want to achieve. It describes the feature from the user's perspective. For example, "...I want to be able to create new user accounts..."

"so that [some reason]": This final segment provides the context and justifies why the user needs this feature, i.e., the benefit they expect to gain from it. For example, "...so I can give new employees access to the system."

User Story Description

User story descriptions provide more context to the user story and help the development team understand the requirements better. They often include the following elements:

• Title: A brief, concise summary of the user story.
• Narrative: This is the user story itself, following the format: "As a [type of user], I want [some goal] so that [some reason]."
• Acceptance Criteria: Detailed conditions must be met for the story to be considered complete. They act as a checklist that confirms the story's functionality.

Story Mapping

Story mapping is a technique that provides a visual representation of the user journey through a product based on user stories. It's a helpful tool for understanding the bigger picture, prioritizing work, and planning releases.

Here's how you can create a story map:

• Identify User Tasks: List all the tasks a user would need to complete to achieve their goal with your product or service.
• Arrange Tasks Into a User Journey: Place the tasks along a horizontal line in the order in which a user would complete them. This forms your backbone.
• Break Down Tasks Into User Stories: Write any related user stories for each task and place them vertically under the relevant task. These are your branches.
• Prioritize User Stories: Determine which stories are most critical to the user journey and move them to the top of their respective branches. These become your walking skeleton, representing the minimum viable product.

User Story Components

User stories in Agile are a way to capture the product's desired functionality from the end user's perspective. They typically consist of three main components:

• The Card: This is the written user story, usually on a physical card or a digital equivalent. The card contains the basic narrative. This keeps the focus on what the user wants to achieve and why.
• The Conversation: This component refers to the discussions about the user story. Conversations help clarify the requirements and ensure that everyone on the team understands the story. These conversations can also add additional notes or diagrams to the card.
• Confirmation: The acceptance criteria determine when a user story is done. They define the specific requirements that must be met for the story to be considered complete.

Story Cards in Agile

Story cards (index cards) are a traditional and popular tool in Agile methodologies. Each card contains a single user story, making them easy to handle, arrange, and rearrange as needed.

Cards are typically physically on a board in the team's workspace, visually representing the product and current sprint backlog. They can be moved around to indicate progress, from 'To Do' to 'In Progress' to 'Done.'

The front of the card usually contains the user story and a unique identifier. At the same time, the back can be used for additional details, such as acceptance criteria, notes from conversations, and any other relevant information.

User Story Examples

Developer user stories.

As a software developer, I want an integrated development environment (IDE) that can detect syntax errors to write code more efficiently and with fewer errors.

User Story in Business Analysis

As a project manager, I want a tool that can track project progress and alert me when tasks are falling behind schedule so that I can proactively manage resources and timelines.

Website User Story

As a blog reader, I want to be able to leave comments on articles so that I can engage with the author and other readers.

How to write good user stories?

Write good user stories by focusing on best practices and how you can avoid common pitfalls.

User Story Best Practices:

• User-Centric: User stories focus on the needs and goals of the end users, ensuring that the features being developed provide value and address their pain points.
• Independent: Each user story is self-contained and independent of other stories, allowing for flexibility in prioritization and implementation.
• Specific and Measurable: User stories are clear and specific, with well-defined acceptance criteria allowing easy evaluation and testing.
• Small and Iterative: User stories are small enough to be completed within a single sprint or iteration, enabling faster feedback, iteration, and value delivery.
• Collaborative: They encourage collaboration between stakeholders, product owners, and development teams, fostering shared understanding and collective decision-making.
• Prioritized: User stories are prioritized based on business value, user impact, and project goals, enabling teams to focus on the most important features first.
• Estimable: User stories are estimable, allowing the team to estimate the effort, complexity, and resources required for implementation, aiding in planning and prioritization.
• Testable: They have clear acceptance criteria defining a successful outcome, facilitating effective testing and validation.
• Valuable: Each user story delivers value to the end users or stakeholders, aligning with the overall vision and objectives of the project.
• Emergent: User stories are open to refinement and adaptation as new insights, feedback, or changes in requirements emerge during the development process.

Common Pitfalls to Avoid in User Story Creation

• Writing Too Detailed Stories Too Early: Details should be discovered closer to development.
• Leaving Out the 'Why': The purpose behind the story (the 'so that' part) is crucial because it provides context and helps prioritize.
• Not Involving the Team: The best user stories are written collaboratively, with input from the whole team

Types of User Stories

• Functional User Stories: Describe features or functions that directly interact with users. E.g., "As a user, I want to save my shopping cart."
• Non-Functional User Stories: Define system qualities like performance and security. E.g., "As a user, I want my data to be encrypted."
• Technical or Infrastructure User Stories: Focus on system-level concerns, usually written by developers. E.g., "As a developer, I want to refactor the codebase."
• Constraint User Stories: Outline restrictions or limitations. E.g., "The system must support 2000 concurrent users."
• Business Rule User Stories: Describe rules that the system must conform to. E.g., "As a manager, I want to approve all refunds."
• User Persona Stories: Based on specific user personas, focusing on their unique needs. E.g., "As a new user, I want a tutorial."
• Epic User Stories: Large user stories that need to be broken down into smaller stories. E.g., "As a user, I want a personalized dashboard."
• Spike User Stories: Used to research or create a proof of concept. E.g., "Research ways to integrate with the payment gateway."

What Is a User Story in Agile?

A user story in Agile is a tool that captures a software feature from an end-user perspective, focusing on the user's needs and the value they would get.

What Is a User Story in Scrum?

In Scrum , a user story is a functional increment of work used to break down the work into manageable chunks that deliver value to the user.

What is a Kanban User Story?

In Kanban , user stories help visualize the workflow. They represent individual pieces of work that move across the Kanban board as they progress.

Prioritizing and Managing User Stories

When it comes to prioritizing user stories in the product backlog, several techniques can be used.

• Stack Ranking: This technique involves taking the list of items that need prioritization and ranking them from the most important to the least important. The items at the top of the stack are given the highest priority.
• Kano Model: The Kano Model is a technique that helps prioritize user stories based on their impact on customer satisfaction. It categorizes user stories into different categories, such as basic expectations, performance factors, and delighters.
• MoSCoW Method : MoSCoW stands for Must have, Should have, Could have, and Won't have. This technique involves categorizing user stories based on their importance and urgency. Must-have stories are given the highest priority, while won't-have stories are deprioritized.
• Bucketing System: This technique involves organizing items on the backlog into buckets or categories based on their themes or priorities. This helps in better organization and decision-making when prioritizing user stories.

When it comes to tools you can use to manage user stories, ActiveCollab has shown amazing results. It manages stories by providing a user-friendly interface to create and prioritize them. It enables collaboration and communication among team members through comment sections.

Tasks can be assigned to team members with due dates for accountability. Progress tracking and reporting features help monitor project milestones and performance.

User Story Board

User storyboards are visual tools used to track the progress of user stories through different stages of development. They typically consist of columns representing the various stages, such as "To Do," "In Progress," and "Completed." User stories are cards that move across the columns as they progress.

By using user storyboards, teams can quickly assess the status of each story, identify bottlenecks, and prioritize work effectively. It provides a clear visual representation of the workflow, improves communication, and helps team members stay aligned throughout development.

Burn-down Chart and Burn-down Rate

A burn-down chart is a visual representation that tracks the progress of work completed against time during a project. It helps teams monitor and manage their progress toward completing the project's tasks or backlog items. The chart consists of two axes: the x-axis represents time, divided into iterations - the number of stories per sprint, while the y-axis represents the remaining work or effort.

As the team completes tasks, the chart's line or curve should gradually slope downwards, indicating the reduction in remaining work over time. By the end of the project, the chart should reach zero, indicating that all planned work has been completed.

On the other hand, the burn-down rate measures the pace at which work is being completed. It represents the rate at which the remaining work is decreasing over time. A steep slope indicates a fast rate, while a shallow slope suggests slower progress. By monitoring the burn-down rate, teams can assess if they are on track to complete the work within the desired timeframe or if adjustments need to be made to meet their goals.

Benefits of Using User Stories

• Increased flexibility: User stories allow for adaptable planning and prioritization, enabling teams to respond to changing requirements effectively.
• Improved product quality: User stories focus on end-user needs, leading to a better understanding and delivery of valuable features.
• Enhanced customer satisfaction: By capturing user requirements and feedback, user stories help ensure the product meets customer expectations.
• Better project control: User stories provide clear visibility into project progress, making tracking and managing tasks easier.
• Faster ROI: Prioritizing user stories based on value allows teams to deliver high-impact features earlier, leading to faster return on investment.
• Reduced risks: User stories promote incremental development, minimizing the risk of developing unnecessary or low-value features.
• Higher team morale: User stories foster collaboration and empower teams, increasing motivation and productivity.

Challenges Associated with User Stories

• Simplification of complex features: User stories need help to capture complex requirements' intricacies, leading to oversimplification.
• Ambiguity, if not well-defined: Insufficiently detailed user stories can result in misunderstandings and confusion among team members.
• Risk of scope creep: User stories can expand beyond the original project scope without proper control, causing delays and resource overruns.
• Potential for neglecting technical tasks: User stories primarily focus on user needs, overlooking important technical considerations or infrastructure improvements.
• Difficulties in scaling for larger projects: Managing and coordinating numerous user stories can become challenging as project size and complexity increase.
• Reliance on continuous stakeholder involvement: User stories require ongoing collaboration with stakeholders, which can be challenging to maintain in certain situations.
• Misinterpretation of user needs: Ambiguities or a lack of clarity within user stories can lead to misunderstandings and deviations from user expectations.
• Overemphasis on short-term goals: User stories often prioritize immediate deliverables, which may hinder long-term planning or strategic decision-making.
• The challenge in integrating with non-agile methods: Incorporating user stories into non-agile processes can pose integration challenges and require adaptation.
• Inconsistency in story point estimations: Estimating story points accurately across different user stories can be challenging, leading to inconsistencies in work effort estimations.

User Story Breakdown

User story breakdown divides a user story into smaller, more manageable tasks or sub-stories. It involves decomposing the user story into specific, actionable steps that the development team can work on. The purpose of breaking down user stories is to ensure clarity, facilitate implementation, and enable better estimates and track progress.

During the breakdown process, the development team collaborates to identify the individual tasks or sub-stories required to fulfill the user story's objectives. These tasks should be small enough to be completed within a single Iterative refinement or sprint. They should also be well-defined, independent, and testable.

By breaking down user stories, teams can:

• Gain a deeper understanding of the work involved: Breaking down user stories helps uncover hidden complexities and dependencies, allowing for more accurate estimation and planning.
• Facilitate collaboration and delegation: Smaller tasks are easier to assign to individual team members, promoting parallel work and reducing bottlenecks.
• Improve estimation and tracking: Breaking down user stories allows for more granular estimation and better progress tracking, as each task can be individually estimated and completed.
• Enhance flexibility and adaptability: Smaller tasks enable teams to respond to changes and adjust priorities more effectively during development.
• Enhance transparency and communication: Breaking down user stories promotes clear communication between the development team and stakeholders, as the breakdown provides a detailed view of the work being done.

Fundamentals of Agile Project Management

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Story Mapping: Overview, Benefits & How to Use It

Table of Contents

Understanding Story Mapping

The process of creating a story map, incorporating story mapping in agile frameworks, practical tips for effective story mapping, a visual way to plan and manage agile projects.

In the dynamic world of Agile development, visualizing the product journey is paramount. Enter story mapping: a robust technique pioneered by Jeff Patton in 2005 that offers a panoramic view of product features from the user’s perspective. By organizing features based on user stories, this two-dimensional map can serve as a cornerstone for Agile teams to plan more effectively and deliver enhanced value. 

With tools like ProductGo integrating story mapping into Jira, Agile teams now have even more sophisticated means to keep track of and manage their projects. This article delves deep into the intricacies of story mapping, offering insights into its components, benefits, and how to integrate it into Agile projects effectively.

Definition of Story Mapping

Story mapping is a technique for visualizing and organizing the features of a product or service from the perspective of the end user. It was introduced by Jeff Patton in 2005 and has since become a popular tool for agile teams to plan and deliver value to their customers.

Story mapping involves creating a two-dimensional map of user stories, where the horizontal axis represents the user journey or the main activities that the user performs, and the vertical axis represents the level of detail or priority of each story. The map helps to identify the core functionality, the dependencies, the gaps, and the opportunities for improvement.

Components of Story Mapping

It consists of four main components: goal, epic, user story, and swimlane.

• Goal: This is the overall objective of your product or feature. It describes what problem you are trying to solve and why it matters to your users and stakeholders. Example: Improve user engagement and retention
• Epic: This is a large chunk of work that contributes to the goal. It usually spans multiple sprints or releases and can be broken down into smaller user stories. Example: Add gamification elements
• User story: This is a specific requirement or functionality that delivers value to the user. It follows the format of “As a [user role], I want to [action], so that [benefit].” Example: As a user, I want to earn badges for completing tasks, so that I feel motivated and rewarded. 
• Swimlane: This is a horizontal line that divides the story map into different sections based on the sprint or release. It helps you prioritize and schedule the user stories according to your roadmap. Example: Sprint 1 | Sprint 2

Benefits of Story Mapping

The benefits of user story mapping are many and can have a significant impact on the development process.

• Improved collaboration and communication. One of the key benefits of user story mapping is that it provides a shared understanding of the product and its features among all stakeholders.
• Increased clarity and understanding. Teams can use user story mapping to understand the big picture and to see how individual product backlog items fit into the overall development effort.
• Better alignment with stakeholder goals. It allows teams to prioritize product backlog items based on their alignment with the goals and priorities of the stakeholders.
• Faster decision-making. Decision-making becomes quicker and more efficient with a shared understanding of the product structure and priority. 
• Improved prioritization. User story mapping helps teams prioritize their product backlog items, making it easier to focus on the most critical work and avoid scope creep.

Read more about the Benefits of Story Mapping here!

Creating a story map is not a one-time activity but an ongoing process that evolves as you learn more about your users and your product. However, there are some general steps that you can follow to get started.

Initial Planning

The first step is to identify who your end-users are and what their goals are. You can use personas, interviews, surveys, or other techniques to gather this information. 

Then, you can write user stories that describe what the users want to do or achieve with your product. A user story is a simple sentence that follows the format: “As a [user], I want to [do something], so that [benefit]”.

Next, you can categorize your user stories based on criteria such as functionality, user role, or theme. This will help you to group similar stories and avoid duplication.

Organizing User Stories

Grouping stories into activities and arranging them based on user journey stages.

The second step is to organize your user stories into a map. You can create your map using sticky notes, index cards, or a digital tool like ProductGo . The idea is to group your stories into activities or epics, which are high-level tasks the users perform with your product.  

For example, “Enroll in courses”, “View grades”, or “Manage profile”. Then, you can arrange your activities horizontally based on the user journey stages, which are the phases that the users go through when using your product. For example, “Explore”, “Register”, “Learn”, or “Review”.

Prioritizing and Estimating

The third step is to prioritize and estimate your user stories. Prioritization helps you to decide which stories are more important or urgent than others. You can use various techniques to prioritize your stories, such as value vs effort matrix, MoSCoW method , or Kano model. The goal is to deliver the most value to the users with the least effort.

Estimation helps you to determine how much time and resources are needed to implement each story. You can use various techniques to estimate your stories, such as planning poker , t-shirt sizes, or Fibonacci numbers. The goal is to have a realistic and consistent estimation across the team.

Slicing the Map for Releases

The fourth step is to slice your map for releases. A release is a set of features you deliver to the users at a particular time. You can use your map to plan your releases based on different criteria, such as business goals, user feedback, or technical dependencies.

One of the most essential concepts in agile development is the Minimal Viable Product (MVP), the most miniature version of your product. It provides enough user value and allows you to validate and learn from your assumptions. You can use your map to identify your MVP by selecting the most essential stories from each activity and stage.

After defining your MVP, you can plan iterative releases by adding more stories from your map until you reach your desired product vision. You can also adjust your releases based on new insights or changes in the market.

What is Agile Frameworks

Agile frameworks are principles and practices that aim to deliver software products or services in an iterative, incremental, and adaptive way. 

Agile frameworks embrace change, collaboration, feedback, and customer satisfaction as the main drivers of value creation. Scrum, Kanban, XP, and SAFe are the most popular agile frameworks.

Jira Story Mapping

Jira is a project management tool that can be used to support any agile methodology. In contrast, agile frameworks are a set of principles and practices that help teams deliver value to customers quickly and iteratively.

Jira can be used to visualize and track work, manage sprints, and collaborate with team members, while agile frameworks provide a structure for planning, executing, and reflecting on work.

Steps to create a user story map in Jira

Following these quick steps will help you create a user story map in Jira:

1. Access to the User Story Map by ProductGo in your Jira projects

• Go to the  Apps  menu and select  StoryMap .
• Select the Jira project where you want to create the user story map.

2. Identify the Goals – Epics – Stories

• Goals:  Identify the high-level goals that users want to achieve with your product.
• Epics:  Break down the goals into smaller, more manageable pieces of work.
• Stories:  Write a user story for each epic. A user story is a brief description of what a user wants to do and why. Follow this format: As a [user role], I want to [do something] so that [I can achieve a goal].

3. Put User Stories into Swimlanes

• Swimlanes are used to group user stories by release or sprint.
• Drag and drop the user stories into the appropriate swimlanes.

4. Start a Sprint/Release

• Once you have organized the user stories into swimlanes, you can start a sprint or release to begin implementing them.

For more details, read this article:  ProductGo Basics #3: How to use User Story Map by ProductGo

Engagement of Stakeholders

One of the key benefits of story mapping is that it fosters engagement and communication among all the relevant stakeholders in your project. Stakeholders can include product owners, developers, testers, designers, customers, users, and anyone else who has a stake in the outcome of your product. 

By involving them in the story mapping process, you can ensure that everyone has a shared understanding of the user journey, the features, and the priorities. You can also elicit feedback and ideas from different perspectives and incorporate them into your story map.

Continuous Refinement

Another important tip for effective story mapping is to keep your story map updated and refined throughout the project lifecycle. 

As you learn more about your users, product, and market, you may need to change or add user stories to your story map. You may also need to adjust the priorities or dependencies of your stories based on new information or feedback.

Visualization Tools

The last tip we will share is using visualization tools to help you create and manage your story maps more efficiently and effectively. 

While you can create a story map using physical tools such as sticky notes and whiteboards, you may find it challenging to maintain and share them with remote or distributed teams. You may also face issues such as limited space, poor visibility, or loss of information.

To overcome these challenges, you can use various tools and software that can help you create visual and interactive story maps online. Our recommendation is ProductGo – Agile User Story Maps, Roadmaps & Persona for Jira , one of the best story mapping tools for Jira.

With ProductGo, user analysis, managing product backlogs, and keeping track of your projects are simplified with its unique functionalities for Portfolios, Projects, and Agile Boards, along with visual models from the users’ perspective.

Story mapping has revolutionized the way Agile teams approach project planning. By creating a visual roadmap of the user’s journey, teams can prioritize tasks, communicate more efficiently, and align their goals better with stakeholder expectations. Leveraging tools such as ProductGo’s story mapping ensures that Agile teams remain cohesive and informed even in our increasingly digital and remote work environment. 

As with any methodology, the key to successful story mapping lies in continuous engagement, regular refinement, and the right visualization tools. In doing so, Agile teams can transform their project delivery and bring their product visions to life more effectively.

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Agile User Story: Definition and Best 3 Examples of 2024

User stories have become the de facto “standard” artifact that agile teams use to capture and validate the intended scope of a software solution. Yet despite (or maybe because of) their ubiquity, many teams still approach User stories from a very traditional lens, and fail to capture the value of the practice, something I call Story Driven Delivery. But ‘What Is an Agile User Story?’

Agile user stories done well are a simple yet powerful means to capture a description of a software feature from an end-user perspective. They help teams focus on delivering value to their users by defining what users need or want and why.  They serve as a focal point for collaboration across the entire team and provide just enough detail to encourage team members to have the right level of conversation at the right time. 

In this article, we’ll demystify the concept of agile user stories, discussing their significance and how they serve as a building block for successful software projects. Whether you’re a beginner or seasoned developer, a delivery lead, or simply curious about the inner workings of software development, understanding user stories is a step toward mastering the art of creating solutions that meet and exceed user expectations.

What Is an Agile User Story?

User stories serve as a pivotal tool in reshaping how organizations approach product development in today’s fast-paced and crowded markets. Today’s environment demands speed, growth, innovation, and a keen emphasis on customer learning. The Agile philosophy addresses these needs by advocating for the creation of value through smaller increments of scope that can be continuously delivered and validated. This approach helps manage the complexities and dependencies associated with big projects and releases, prioritizing delivering smaller, more immediate features to the market.

User stories embody this philosophy through a semi-formal narrative structure that articulates solution functionality in small increments of value. Unlike traditional requirements, stories are worked on by the entire cross-functional team; Stories are a unit of scope, a unit of solution value/behavior, a unit of planning, a unit of testing, and most of all, a unit of storytelling . The entire team owns and collaborates on user stories. The action-oriented nature of stories emphasizes interactions between users and systems, focusing on how the system should respond to user actions rather than on the technical aspects of development tasks.

The essence of telling a compelling user story lies in its ability to communicate user goals, activities, and tasks in a manner that prioritizes user interactions and observable system behavior. This contrasts with traditional approaches that may dwell on system internals or the specific tasks required to build a system. By concentrating on user interactions, stories facilitate a better understanding of the user’s needs and how the system can meet those needs effectively.

Adopting user stories encourages teams to adopt a user-centric perspective, focusing on delivering functionality that provides real value to users. This shift towards prioritizing user interactions and system responses, as observed by users, represents a significant move away from conventional product development practices. It emphasizes the importance of understanding user behavior and designing solutions that cater directly to user needs, thus aligning product development efforts with the overarching goals of agility and customer satisfaction​​.

The Power of User Story Mapping in Agile

Story Mapping in Agile is a highly collaborative practice designed to iteratively identify and define the scope and priority of future state system behaviour. This technique enables teams to systematically decompose an initiative into smaller, recognizable units of business value, known as stories. It fosters collaboration and provides just enough structure to focus conversations and accelerate understanding. 

By arranging stories in a two-dimensional map, story mapping creates a sequential narrative from left to right, prioritizing top to bottom. This results in a highly visible, shareable representation of the product’s end-to-end scope, making it an accessible place for discussions that set and share context. The practice inherently supports iterative delivery and product decomposition by mapping user goals to business objectives and actions to tangible system behaviors, ensuring that each story contributes to major user categories, objectives, and tangible sequential events that deliver real business value.

What Are the Core Elements of User Story Mapping?

The core elements of user story mapping can be:

Identify the major categories of users that gain value from using the system. Understanding personas is crucial as it grounds the story map in real user needs and behaviours.

These are broad objectives tied to tangible business outcomes and value. Epics help in categorizing user stories into larger, cohesive groups that deliver significant value.

Represent smaller concrete units of business value with the smallest delivery increment. Besides, features break epics into more manageable pieces, typically taking several business days to deliver.

User Stories

The building blocks of Agile delivery capture small increments of system behaviour visible to users. They are prioritized and ordered vertically on the map to reflect their importance and sequence.

Market Increments

Represent the next unit of scope to be delivered. They cut across the story map, encompassing stories from multiple epics and features. This approach allows teams to visualize and prioritize work that delivers cohesive value to the market, teams can focus on releasing features that together enhance the product in a meaningful way, addressing user needs comprehensively and effectively.

What are the User stories purposes?

User stories describe solution functionality in small increments of value from the perspective of an end user. They help teams decompose larger scope into manageable units of work that deliver business value incrementally, addressing the complexity and dependencies typical of big releases.

User stories are crafted by the entire team and serve as a mechanism to facilitate collaboration towards development efforts that align towards user needs and experiences, facilitating a more user-centric development process​​.

What Are the Principles of Story Mapping?

These principles guide teams in creating a visual representation of the product journey, prioritizing work, and ensuring that the development process is aligned with user needs and business objectives. Here are the core principles highlighted:

1. Outline User and System Behavior, Not Tasks

•  Focus the story map on describing the behaviors users and systems will exhibit rather than breaking down the work into a list of tasks. This approach emphasizes the outcomes and interactions that are important to users and stakeholders.

2. Behavior-Driven Descriptions

• Encourage the description of stories regarding the behavior the system will exhibit once a story has been implemented. This makes the map a tool for visualizing how the product will work and how users will interact with it.

3. Testable Increments of Functionality

• Use the story map to delineate testable increments of functionality. This principle ensures that the story map is a planning tool for delivering work that can be tested and validated against user expectations.

4. Prioritize Based on User Impact

• Arrange stories in the map to reflect their priority, focusing on delivering the most value to users as early as possible. This often means delivering a minimal viable product (MVP) that can be expanded upon with additional features over time.

5. System Stories Alongside User Stories

• Define system stories to outline the required behaviour for information flow across systems, treating systems almost like users. This ensures that back-office and system-to-system interactions are considered in the user journey.

6. Fine-Grained and Valuable Stories

• Balance the need for stories to be fine-grained enough to be manageable and detailed enough to deliver value. Stories should be broken down to a size that can be delivered within a reasonable timeframe, typically within a sprint.

7. Business Language and Specificity

• Ground the map in specific business language, ensuring that business experts and stakeholders can understand it. This makes the story map a communication tool that bridges the gap between technical teams and business stakeholders.

Tips for Writing Good User Stories 

Writing good stories is all about a reasonable flow for a story driven development approach could be as follows:

Idea Shaping

When shaping an idea, the focus is on defining the initiative through a broad understanding of the project’s scope and objectives. This involves identifying users and their problems, solution features that address those problems, and tying those features to value, cost, and effort. An initial, incomplete, and rough story map is often used to collaboratively assemble this view. Other agile artifacts like the Opportunity Canvas, Uncertainty Kanban, and Impact Map can also be leveraged to aid in capturing user-oriented assumptions, defining marketable increments, and ensuring a shared understanding among stakeholders, aligning on the initiative’s direction before moving into more detailed discovery and delivery phases.

During discovery, Stories and in particular, Story Mapping plays a crucial role. It is a collaborative effort that iteratively defines the scope and sets the priority for the future behaviour of the system, breaking down the initiative into smaller, manageable units of business value—user stories. 

These stories are then organized into a map that outlines a narrative flow and helps prioritize the work based on its importance and impact. During this phase, teams also focus on refining and prioritizing marketable increments of value . 

These increments are carefully selected to ensure they are aligned with business goals, small enough to be quickly delivered and validated, yet substantial enough to provide significant learning and value. 

This systematic approach ensures that the development efforts are focused on delivering tangible outcomes that directly contribute to the project’s objectives. A key aspect of discovery is that you only identify the stories required for the next marketable increment or two.

You avoid completing the entire map. You also don’t go into the details of every story. The idea here is to lay out enough understanding to understand what the next couple of weeks or months of work will look like and no more.

Exploration

The Story Exploration phase aims to deepen the team’s collective understanding of user stories, ensuring all aspects of delivery for the upcoming sprint(s) are well-defined and agreed upon. This involves refining stories within a feature or thin slice , ensuring each story has clearly defined acceptance criteria, and addressing key risks, unknowns, or assumptions. 

Activities include collaborative sessions where Business Analysts, Product Designers, and Technical teams define and refine acceptance criteria, explore and mitigate risks, and prepare stories for delivery.

Various practices like the Planning Game, Architecture Modeling, Domain Driven Design, etc support these activities, enhancing clarity and shared understanding.

A critical part of this phase is the detailed narrative construction around user and system interactions within stories. Behavioural acceptance criteria are crafted to specify outcomes from user actions or system triggers, following a “When [trigger], then [reaction]” format. Domain-oriented acceptance criteria detail structural or compositional concepts, focusing on information relationships and rules. The exploration sessions aim to produce a cohesive set of stories that are technically feasible and aligned with user needs and business goals. This detailed, iterative approach ensures that by the end of the Story Exploration phase, the team is ready to move forward with a clear, actionable plan for the next set of features to be developed.

During delivery we can refine story acceptance criteria into testable scenario. In stead of creating tests and test cases in a separate artefact, we expand on stories in  a way that they become test cases .Spec by Example is practice that provides a structured approach for capturing and communicating complex system behaviours through simple, structured examples. Using this technique you extend acceptance criteria defined during Exploration with real-world scenarios, expectations and examples. By making every story tangible, and testable we address the common challenge of interpreting complex requirements, as humans tend to understand concepts better when they can see them in action. Stories defined using Spec By example go a long way toward making them suitable for automated testing. This ensures that the documentation of business rules is always current and aligned with the actual system behaviour​​. If they aren’t tests will tell you so immediately.

The specification process involves detailing stories, in small batches of only a couple at a time, extending previously written acceptance criteria into multi-step scenarios. These scenarios are enriched with concrete examples, forming a comprehensive test suite that captures various test cases. Developers create test fixtures with BDD tools like Cucumber, writing code until all tests pass. This cycle concludes with a final verification and manual testing by Business Analysts or Quality Control, ensuring that the developed feature accurately meets the specified criteria. This meticulous approach to story development is not for everyone, but when used can not only enhance team understanding and communication but also significantly improve the efficiency and quality of the team’s delivery.

Agile User Story Best Practices

When using a story-driven approach, consider these best practices. 

• Work Collaboratively: Emphasize teamwork across all roles to ensure a shared understanding and collective responsibility in story development and delivery.
• Be Action-Oriented: Craft stories with a clear verb-noun structure, focusing on specific actions to drive forward momentum and clarity in execution.
• Multiple Levels of Detail: Manage work by breaking it down into hierarchical levels, from high-level epics to detailed user stories, allowing for better organization and visualization of tasks at varying degrees of detail.
• Scatter-Aggregate: Apply this pattern to decompose large objectives into smaller, manageable stories (scatter), then aggregate these into cohesive increments or epics for delivery, optimizing for learning and adaptability.
• Explore & Extrapolate: Engage in thoroughly exploring stories within a feature to understand all aspects fully, and use extrapolation to estimate and plan for unseen complexities or additional work.
• Split and Count: Break down stories or features into smaller, more manageable pieces to facilitate easier estimation and planning, leveraging count for throughput and capacity planning.
• Plan Using Throughput and Story Numbers: Utilize historical throughput data and the number of stories within epics or increments for more accurate planning and forecasting.
• Prioritize Starting with the Spine: Focus on the core functionalities or stories first (the “spine”) and then work outward, ensuring that the most critical aspects of the product are delivered first.
• Narrative is More Important Than Writing: Prioritize the storytelling aspect of user stories, focusing on the narrative to convey the value and context more effectively than mere documentation.
• Small, Testable, Behavioral Focus: Ensure stories are concise, centred on behavioural changes, and easily testable to facilitate quick feedback loops and validation.
• Acceptance Criteria “Pass the Ball”: Design acceptance criteria to illustrate the interaction between system and user or system components, akin to passing the ball in a team sport, to ensure seamless transitions and integrations.

What Is the User Story Format in Agile?

The format of a user story changes based on where a story is in the story delivery lifecycle. Stories are progressively refined over time, with more detail being added the closer they are to being delivered.

Shaping and Discovery

Shaping and Discovery focus on understanding the broad feature set and breaking it down into actionable items. For example, “ Internal Operations-> Store an image” could be a high-level user story capturing the essence of what needs to be developed without getting into the details.

As we dive deeper, stories become more detailed, specifying the desired outcomes and the conditions under which they are met. A combination of behavioral and domain oriented acceptance criteria can be used. For instance:

Title Store an Image:

User: Internal Operations

Acceptance Criteria

• (B) When the daily transaction cycle is complete, then the system retrieves all transactions for the last days Interac.
• (B) When the system successfully retrieves the daily transactions from Interact, then the system retrieves internal transactions from the internal transaction logs, and the system compares the two transaction records.
• (B) When discrepancies are found, then the system creates a report that contains entries for each discrepancy and alerts User ABC.
• (D) Each discrepancy entry includes both transactions as well as the discrepancy descriptor.

The delivery involves the specification development, testing, and implementation of the story, ensuring all acceptance criteria are met. Stories are extended to support testability.

Store an Image:

• A staff user is logged into the LMS with scanning privileges.
• And that user initiates a scan of an image named “TeamPhoto.jpg” on the date “2023-10-05” using the scanner “ScannerModelX.”
• The LMS processes the image scan.
• The system validates the scan for completeness, including all required metadata: date, image name, and scanner model.
• And  the system formats the payload as specified:

  “imageName” : “TeamPhoto.jpg” ,

  “scanDate” : “2023-10-05” ,

  “scannerModel” : “ScannerModelX”

• And The system then sends the formatted payload to the Storage Microservice.

Invalid Flow

• When the scan or metadata is invalid or missing, 
• Then the system sends an error message back to the user: “Image Scan Unsuccessful – Missing Metadata” 
• And the System logs the incident for review.

What Are the 3 C’s of User Story in Agile?

The 3 C’s of user stories in Agile —Card, Conversation, and Confirmation—provide a framework for encapsulating requirements in a compact, understandable, and testable format. In addition, this concept is fundamental in guiding the creation and communication of Agile user stories , ensuring they deliver value through a collaborative and iterative process.

The Card represents the physical or digital record of the user’s story. It’s typically concise and captures the essence of a requirement in a format that’s easy to understand and share. 

Plus, the card serves as a tangible reminder of the feature or functionality to be developed, acting as a placeholder for more detailed discussions. It encapsulates the user’s need in a simple format, often following the template: ‘[User] [Verb][Noun].’ This ensures that Agile user stories remain focused on describing increments of testable behaviour.

2. Conversation

The ‘Conversation’ is where the real value of the user story unfolds. It involves ongoing dialogue among team members, stakeholders, and users to flesh out the details of the user story captured on the card.

This conversation is crucial for uncovering the underlying needs, exploring potential solutions, and ensuring a shared understanding of what will be built. Through these discussions, the team gains insights into the user’s perspective, the feature’s context, and the success criteria. 

3. Confirmation

The ‘Confirmation’ refers to the acceptance criteria associated with the user story. These criteria are agreed upon during the conversation phase and define what must be true for the story to be complete.

Moreover, they provide a clear, testable checklist that guides development and testing efforts, ensuring the implemented feature meets the user’s needs and the team’s quality standards. Confirmation ensures a shared definition of ‘done’ for the user story, facilitating effective validation and feedback.

Integrating the 3 C’s of user stories in Agile , creating and managing user stories in Agile emphasizes the importance of clarity, collaboration, and customer focus. By starting with a card, engaging in meaningful conversation, and confirming with clear acceptance criteria, teams can make sure that they are consistently delivering value to the user.

Who Is the Writer of User Stories in Agile?

In Agile, the responsibility for writing user stories can extend across various roles within the team, reflecting a collaborative and inclusive approach to project development. 

This approach aligns with our perspective in Agile by design , emphasizing the importance of shared understanding and collective ownership of the project goals and requirements. Here’s how different roles contribute to the creation of Agile user stories :

Product Owner

The owner of the product plays a crucial role in creating Agile user stories . They are primarily responsible for defining the vision and requirements of the product, often drafting the initial user stories to reflect the needs and values of the users. 

The Product Owner prioritises these stories to ensure the team first works on the most valuable features.

Team Members (Developers, Designers, Testers)

Agile team members, including developers, designers, and especially testers, contribute to the formulation and refinement of user stories. Through collaborative sessions like backlog grooming or story mapping, team members can offer insights into technical feasibility, design considerations, and testing strategies. This collaborative effort ensures that stories are well-rounded, technically viable, and clearly understood by all.

Related Article: What Is An Agile Coach?

Analysts and Stakeholders

Analysts can help translate complex business requirements into user stories that are clear and actionable for the development team.

Stakeholders, on the other hand, can provide additional context and clarification to ensure that the stories align with the broader business objectives and user needs.

Scrum Master

While not directly responsible for writing user stories, the Scrum Master facilitates the processes that help teams effectively define and refine their stories. They ensure that the team has the time, space, and tools needed for effective story-writing sessions and encourage practice enhancing clarity, such as INVEST criteria.

Collaborative Effort

It’s really important to clarify that these are guidelines writing Agile user stories is above all a team effort. It is seen as a collective endeavour that benefits from diverse perspectives. Additionally, the process involves continuous iteration and feedback, with stories being refined as new information emerges or as the team’s understanding of the user needs evolves.

By involving various roles in the writing of Agile user stories , teams can ensure that the features developed are closely aligned with user needs, technically feasible, and contribute to the overall strategic goals of the project.

In wrapping up our exploration of Agile user stories , including their examples, mapping, and the critical three C’s (Card, Conversation, Confirmation), we’ve ventured through a landscape that intertwines the simplicity of user needs with the complexity of delivering tangible value. Actually, this journey has not just been about the mechanics of writing stories or the methodologies of organizing them; it’s been a deep dive into the philosophy that drives Agile at its core—delivering value efficiently and empathetically.

Our mindset at Agile By Design pushes us beyond conventional boundaries, urging us to see user stories not as mere tickets to be checked off but as narratives that guide us toward understanding and meeting user needs in the most effective way possible. 

Furthermore, our examples show how user stories capture essential needs through mapping, how they’re organized to reflect the journey towards fulfilling those needs, and through the three C’s in use, how they foster communication, clarity, and confirmation throughout the Agile process.

Remember that Agile user stories’ true power lies not in their format or structure but in their ability to connect us more closely to the people we’re aiming to serve.

They encourage us to think creatively, collaborate more deeply, and continually adapt to ensure that what we’re building resonates with real human experiences. So, let’s carry forward the insight that every user story, mapped out or meticulously detailed, is a step towards a more Agile, responsive, and ultimately human-centred way of creating value.

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User journey

A user journey represents a sequence of events or experiences a user might encounter while using a product or service. A user journey can be mapped or designed to show the steps and choices presented as interactions, and the resulting actions.

A user journey can be mapped in order to better understand the flow and make improvements, or it can be designed from scratch based on a desired specification or story.

When designing an experience it is usually only necessary to document a user journey is it is of a certain complexity. For many websites and applications it is possible to agree on user journey based on a specification, sitemap or wireframe. If there are many choices, states or possible scenarios leading to bifurcated experiences, documented mapping of the user journeys will help a project team to better understand the complexity of the tasks at hand.

The user journey is the responsibility of everyone on the design who can affect the user experience.

User flow User journey mapping Experience map

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User Journey Mapping – A Method in User Experience Design

Anja Endmann has a degree in Communication Psychology and is product owner with gateprotect GmbH – A Rohde and Schwarz Company. Previously, she worked as a senior user experience researcher with Software AG. Her tasks included user research, software evaluation, agile&user experience, project management, coaching and training. Since 2012 she has been a lecturer at the HTWK Leipzig and the HTW Dresden. She is active in German UPA’s work group for user research and was UPA’s appointed expert chairwoman in 2014 / 15.

Daniela Keßner holds a degree in Psychology and is user interface concepter with TimoCom Soft- und Handware GmbH. She has been working in the field of user experience design for more than a decade and in various industries. Her main fields are user research, interaction design, and evaluation of interactive products. Previous career milestones were Software AG, Kompetenzinitiative Usability at TU Berlin, and Siemens AG.

Companies are more and more interested in providing a positive user experience (UX). The aim is to offer a smooth and pleasant experience with the application at hand. As UX consultants, we often face the following basic questions at the start of user experience projects: How can we learn about the user processes in the scope of the project, that is, the activities a user needs to perform to achieve a certain goal? How can we gather the essential steps and stages of the user process and the experiences accompanying them? How do we identify where in the process user research is needed? In order to help answer these questions, we suggest the method of User Journey Mapping, which we developed and refined in the course of seven customer projects.

1 Introduction

During our joint time as UX consultants we worked on UX projects, where applications were supposed to be either newly developed from scratch, optimized, or expanded. Our projects varied considerably in length and range, and were set in different industrial sectors, such as healthcare, automotive and transportation. Our projects therefore consisted of regularly changing subjects and customers.

Typically, the biggest challenge at the start of a new project was to become acquainted with the customer’s subject and the project’s initial situation, in order to identify and execute the first steps of the user centered design process [ 1 ]. This overview was necessary even before we could execute specific user research activities. Therefore, we were looking for a method that would provide an effective and efficient beginning and at the same time include stakeholders and knowledge carriers right from the start. In the following chapters we present a practical step by step description of the method as well as its adaptation to special project requirements. We sum up its advantages and challenges and conclude with a comparison between User Journey Mapping and its origin, User Story Mapping.

2 Definition of the User Journey Mapping

Our method “User Journey Mapping“ has its roots in “Story Mapping” [ 2 , 3 ], a well-known and proven method in agile development. We used the Story Mapping method in seven customer projects in different industrial sectors and gradually transformed it into the method User Journey Mapping. In contrast to Story Mapping, which aims at collecting functions of the system under development, User Journey Mapping is focused on learning about relevant user processes in order to identify areas with need for user research.

Its trigger and goal

All activities to be executed

All involved personas, i. e., prototypical user with the characteristics and the usage behavior of a real user group

Known requirements, use cases, support tickets, problems.

User Journey Mapping is a creative method used during a workshop moderated by an UX professional. The aim of the method is to learn in a short time about relevant user processes and identify and plan necessary UX activities, even before entering the user research phase. Possibly all relevant stakeholders and knowledge carriers should participate in this workshop. This could be, for example, the product owner, the product manager, marketing manager, software architect, developer and a user representative.

We used User Journey Mapping in the kickoff workshops for new customer projects. The method is suited for a group of four to twelve participants. Usually, an average user process can be mapped in two to four hours time. An example of a user journey map can be seen in figure 1 , and a schematic representation in figure 2 .

User Journey Map of a Mobile Website – A Project with sprd.net AG.

Schematic representation of a user journey map.

3 Approach of Creating a User Journey Map

3.1 preparation and setting.

Good preparation is essential, especially if the workshop is held at the customer’s location. A sufficiently large room has to be available, that allows the group to freely move around in front of a large pin board. The user journey map is created on a sufficiently wide piece of brown paper on the pin board. Creative materials, such as a flip chart, masking tape, felt-tip pens and sticky notes, should be provided.

3.2 Procedure

In order to create a user journey map, all personas relevant for the user process have to be known, as well as current usage problems of the respective user groups. It is helpful when known requirements are brought to the workshop.

The process of creating a user journey map can be broken down into eight steps, which we will illustrate using a fictitious, limited project example:

A supermarket chain wants to optimize their customer’s in-store shopping experience with IT. In order to learn about the process and the need for research, a customer journey map workshop is set up. The attendees are two customers, a representative of the supermarket chain, a shop assistant, a cashier, and the UX professional as moderator.

Step 1: Specifying Personas

All personas relevant to the project are named and for each persona a separate flip chart page is prepared. Each participant gathers gains and pains for each persona and writes them on sticky notes of a certain color. Each sticky note shows only one fact. The content of the notes are presented to the group and pinned onto the prepared flip chart page.

Example: In the supermarket project several different customer personas are in scope. Among them are a single in his twenties, a retired couple in their late sixties, and a family shopper. Additionally, two supermarket employee personas are in scope; the shop assistant and the cashier. For the user journey map example, let us focus on the shopping process of the family persona. The group comes up with Marlene, a married mother of two, part-time secretary, doing the family’s grocery shopping once a week on Thursdays. She is always in a hurry between work and picking up her kids from kindergarten. She has a well-prepared shopping list and wants to just cruise through. It annoys her, when she has to look for items or has to ask for their locations.

Step 2: Preparing the User Journey Map

The group writes the process name, trigger and goal, as well as the name of all personas on sticky notes of a second color. The process information is pinned on horizontally as headlines at the top of the brown paper. Personas are pinned on vertically at the left side.

In our example supermarket project, the process title is “Grocery shopping for a family”. Its trigger is “It’s Thursday, shopping list is prepared.” Its goal is “Got all items without trouble.”

Step 3: Writing Down the Process’s Associated Activities

Each participant writes all activities necessary to reach the process goal down on sticky notes of a third color. Each sticky note shows exactly one activity, for example “pick apples”, “weigh apples”, “find shop assistant”, “ask for pistachios”, “go to cash register” and so on.

Step 4: Organizing Activities

Each participant introduces his contents to the group and pins his sticky notes onto the pin board along an imaginary time line from left to right. Vertically, activities can be assigned to the executing persona. When participants introduce their content, they pin duplicates on top of each other, and similar content next to each other in a column. In our shopping example the pin board now shows a process starting with “enter store”, “get shopping cart” and ending with “pay”, “put items back in cart”, “leave store”. In between it most likely shows a variety of “get item x” or “search for item y” notes.

Step 5: Identifying and Naming Tasks

Now the group looks at the user journey map and condenses the contents, as well as discusses and adjusts the flow of activities. Activities that serve a similar sub goal are grouped into tasks. The group finds a name for each task and places it on a sticky note of a third color into the user journey map. For example, activities concerning picking, weighing and packing fruit are grouped into a task called “buy fruit.” Activities concerning finding a shop assistant, asking for a certain item and getting directions are grouped into the task “get help.”

Step 6: Complementing Activities and Tasks

After grouping activities into tasks, the group again checks the user journey map. Are there activities or tasks missing? Are there situations that require a different flow of activities or tasks? Are there alternative flows? Missing activities or tasks should then be added to the user journey map. In our example, the group might add the missing task of “returning empty bottles” and its related activities.

Step 7: Assigning Pains and Gains

The group assigns the gains of each persona to the respective task in the process. If necessary, new gains can be added.

Now the group assigns the pains of each persona to the respective tasks. Again, new pains can be added. To identify new pains one could ask if there are further challenges or problems that we know about in the user process.

Often at this point the group spontaneously starts having design or solution ideas. The group should write these down on sticky notes of a fourth color and integrate them into the user journey map. In our example, Marlene’s annoyance with having to ask for an item she cannot find will be added, as well as the newly discovered annoyance of a failure-prone and time-consuming procedure at the bottle return automat. The suggested solution idea of providing phone stations throughout the store for customers to conveniently ask for items is added as well.

Step 8: Adding Existing Documents

If there are requirements, support tickets, use case documents, or other documented usage problems in the project, they can be added at the respective location in the user journey map.

Step 9: Identifying Next Steps

Finally, the group checks the created user journey map. Please refer to figure 3 for our user journey map of our fictitious project example. Where in the process are there indications of usage problems? Where in the user process is information missing? This way the group identifies where in the process specific user research activities are needed, or for which tasks in the process, the development of design concepts can be started. In our example the work around difficult to find grocery items might highlight a usage problem in the process of grocery shopping that needs detailed research.

User journey map for fictitious project example.

3.3 Adaptions of the Method for Several User Processes

In some of our projects more than one user process had to be illustrated. If there are more than three processes a new challenge arises, as potential connections between processes have to be identified and mapped. In this case, we prepared a separate pin board for a process landscape, in which the relevant user processes were illustrated in an overview. The process landscape should be created before single user journey maps are created.

The name of the application becomes the title of the process landscape. Then the group gathers relevant user processes and for each one, notes the name, trigger and goal. Then, they pin the process names on in chronological order from top to bottom, and each process’s trigger and goal next to the name. After this is done, connections and relations between processes are visualized as touch points. Now the group prioritizes the processes and starts with creating the user journey map for the most important process.

3.4 User Journey Maps in Interviews

We could not start a project every time with a kickoff workshop. Some projects were simply too small for this. Instead, sometimes we had to make do with interviewing stakeholders and users, in order to gather their understanding of the process and its tasks. In one of our projects we successfully experimented with User Journey Mapping in interviews. For this we altered the procedure slightly.

Each interview was divided into two parts, the regular interview and the assisted creation of a user journey map. During each of the six interviews, the interviewer first conducted a common research interview with a stakeholder or with a user, during which the interviewee described his tasks, and his work procedures. The interviewer should not mention a user journey map or any of its components at this time. Instead, he should have the person speak about his work routines in his own words. During the interview, the interviewer wrote down on note cards all relevant information needed to create the user journey map, including pains and gains, name of the process, trigger, personas and activities. This part of the interview ended when the work process was described sufficiently.

In the second part of the interview the interviewee used the note cards from the interviewer to create a user journey map, with assistance from the interviewer. The interviewer is supposed to help with the visualizing, but not to intervene concerning the content. During the further process, activities are grouped, tasks are named, content is added and pains and gains assigned.

The visualization helps discover gaps in the process flow.

The interviewee often notices and adds missing content.

The interviewer can ask detailed follow up questions for certain activities.

The results of the interview are validated directly during the interview.

The scope of the interviews has to be limited, because it will take longer than normal due to the interactive nature of the second part.

The interviewer must not be tempted to just inquire about the elements of the user journey map.

The interviewer has to support the interviewee in the second part, without interfering.

The user journey maps from a series of interviews have to be then consolidated into one map. We found, this user journey map from a series of interviews can be used just as validly as a map from a workshop.

4 Advantages and Challenges of Using User Journey Mapping

4.1 advantages.

It provides UX professionals a fast and effective start on a project’s subject.

A complex process is shown in a visualization.

The process flow is accomplished in a joint effort.

Single activities in the process can be analyzed in more detail, so that tasks can be identified.

It becomes clear, which tasks to focus on later in user research.

All stakeholders are involved, feel taken into consideration and can give their opinions and ideas on the project.

For UX professionals the results of the method are a sound basis to identify and plan relevant next steps in the user centered design process [ 1 ].

4.2 Challenges

The moderator should have some experience in moderating creative processes in groups, as it might be necessary to keep the group in good spirits.

The moderator should be vigilant that the group remains focused on the problem and for example does not start an ideation workshop.

For each user process in the scope of the project, a separate user journey map has to be created.

If there are more than three user processes to be created, the touch points of the processes should be visualized in a separate map (see following chapter).

5 User Journey Mapping Versus Story Mapping

Although the methods of story mapping [ 2 , 3 ] and User Journey Mapping sound similar, they are nevertheless quite different in purpose, setup and outcome. User story mapping, as mentioned before, is rooted in agile software development. It aims at a minimal viable product and serves to understand the functionality of the system under development. A story map might be done by a single person. It neither requires collaboration nor the involvement of users, or any documentation of reported usage problems, but relies on the knowledge of the person or team doing the mapping. Resulting stories become part of the backlog and serve to plan the next software increment. Throughout the development process the story map provides the big picture of the product: what is the system intended to do for the users?

User Journey Mapping on the other hand is done at the beginning of a UX project in order to ease the learning about relevant user processes. It aims to discovering needs for user research, as well as the journey, as it is experienced by users themselves. It is done in a decidedly collaborative manner and best done with participation of real users. Personas, pain points and other data are valued resources that help complete the user journey map. Therefore, the main difference between story mapping and User Journey Mapping is their views regarding requirements. In story mapping functional requirements are derived from the developer’s idea of user needs. In contrast User Journey Mapping prepares the way to detailed user research and a deeper understanding of real user’s needs.

User Journey Mapping is a creative method for a quick entry in complex UX projects. It allows us to learn in a short time about relevant user processes and identify and plan necessary UX activities, even before entering the user research phase. At a kickoff workshop with all stakeholders present, the User Journey Mapping takes about four hours of time and requires an experienced moderator to effectively lead the group in the process. In a slightly altered form User Journey Mapping can also be used in interviews. Either way, a successfully created user journey map serves to decide about user research activities and to prioritize the work on design concepts.

About the authors

[1] ISO 9241–210 (2010). Ergonomics of human-system interaction – Part 210: Human-centered design for interactive systems Vernier, Geneva. Search in Google Scholar

[2] Patton, Jeff (2012). User Story Mapping: Discover the Whole Story, Build the Right Product. O‘Reilly & Associates, Sebastopol. Search in Google Scholar

[3] Röpstroff, Sven und Wiechmann, Robert (2012). Scrum in der Praxis: Erfahrungen, Problemfelder und Erfolgsfaktoren. dpunkt.verlag, Heidelberg. Search in Google Scholar

© 2016 Walter de Gruyter GmbH, Berlin/Boston

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Articles in the same issue.

User Story vs User Journey

What are the main differences between a user story and a user journey.

A user story is a brief, concise description of a task from the perspective of the user.

For example: “As a ‘type of user ‘, I want ‘ some goal’ so that ‘some reason’ .”

A user journey is a described series of steps that show how a typical user would interact with the web app that is being designed.

The main difference between the two, is that a user story is based on a specific user and caters to a particular type of user to answer a specific problem. A user journey can follow a “random user” that may using the tool. This also includes dynamic user journey scenarios.

How can User Story Mapping help integrate both a user story and a user journey?

User Story Mapping has been described as a tool that can be used for many purposes, including product development, feature definition, version improvement, and project management.

In short, you are able to create a map, highlighting the user story, as a persona, whilst building the map for a user journey. Placing cards and tasks and building out the entire epic.

You can get started straight away, and intuitively you’ll be building maps that remove the debate between user story and user journey. Just head over to FeatureMap.co to get started.

Otherwise, read on to get the steps to get started.

We are looking at the steps to create answers that fulfil both requirements for a user story, whilst also catering to the user journey .

Here, we explore how best to utilise the User Story Mapping methodology to help define your path. We also have the added bonus that the first two steps instantly reward in their own right.

The first two steps can be very rewarding. Firstly, planning the map will give you a pathway to the point where you can start writing user stories or journeys.

Secondly, the end result is a visual chart showing the structure of your stories. This will give you the steps you need to take for development.

Here is another way to approach User Story Mapping in three steps.

This is a relatively quick way of getting to a point where you can start development work.

The start of a user story map on FeatureMap

Hosting your Story Mapping Session

Because User Story Mapping can be complex, it is important to have a framework for the session. It is also important to explain what User Story Mapping is and describe the process.

Start with tasks where the team thinks about the product, users, development, and personas.

We start by brainstorming every task that users will want to address when using the product.

Silent Brainstorming.

Task each participant to write down steps in your cards, every step will need to cover from the users first engagement to the conclusion of the users interaction. Encourage the team to think of these as actions not features.

It’s okay for each individual on the team to focus on other user journeys. For example if we take an app, someone may do a customer, and another may write about a copywriter, whilst the developers may think from the perspective of the administrators.

Top Tip: Writing them so they start with a verb is a good technique.

Encourage people to be creative and try to cover tasks and steps wide, but not deep. This part of User Story Mapping is about breadth not depth.

Start posting all cards and tasks in one large map.

That’s fine if you have duplicates. Just group them together, and these should sit beside each other on the line (not above or below).

As you expand and get into the swing of it you can easily drag and drop and delete if needed.

The beauty of using digital software for large collaboration tasks such as this allows you and you and your team to easily edit, expand and develop your map all at the same time.

This first line is the user tasks, and they form the backbone of your story map.

Then we organise these tasks into wider goals, and arrange them in order of completion.

These groups are known as “epics” or “activities”.

As facilitator, you can walk along the line of tasks and ask where the team think the splits are between each group of tasks, and what each group should be called.

For example, if you were building an app for an app to arrange your movies, you might group user tasks into epics like this:

• Browse DVDs in collection – epic
• View flat list of all DVDs – user task
• View DVD cover thumbnails in results – user task
• DVD Spec Call – user task

We can then move into the Prioritisation exercise, further developing the user story map .

This is the stage where you start writing in the details, building up the tasks and redefining tasks.

This may include adding tasks, merging tasks or separating tasks.

It is important to detail the tasks enough to remember in the future. After writing all the tasks, you should have a comprehensive map by this stage. Task your team to go over each line (now defined as Epics/activities) and ensure you have everything charted. This is where the User Story Map will become easier, as you will now have a visual chart of a defined product. Here you can move to the next steps.

Now you are ready to start prioritising the user stories on your map. You can start adapting and moving your tasks to sprints, also known as versions for your product.

You can check out the Movie Buddy Public Board here at FeatureMap.

You could do an entire User Story session with Post-It notes with your in-house team, but better yet digitally, remotely or supporting your in person meeting using FeatureMap.co.

Check out FeatureMap.co and sign up to try for free.

Related Articles:

Good design is actually a lot harder to notice than poor design, in part because good designs fit our needs so well that the design is invisible, serving us without drawing attention to itself. Bad design, on the other hand, screams out its inadequacies, making itself very noticeable. —Don Norman, The Design of Everyday Things

Design Thinking

Design Thinking is a customer-centric development process that creates desirable products that are profitable and sustainable over their lifecycle.

It goes beyond the traditional focus on the features and functions of a proposed product. Instead, it emphasizes understanding the problem to be solved, the context in which the solution will be used, and the evolution of that solution.

Traditional waterfall approaches to product development are sequential: requirements are defined, and solutions are designed, built, and delivered to the market. The focus tends to be on the most apparent problems. Often, success is determined by implementing a solution that meets the requirements instead of the user’s needs. This results in products and services with unusable or ignored features that frustrate users and fail to meet the enterprise’s business goals .

Design thinking (Figure 1) represents a profoundly different approach to product and Solution development, in which divergent and convergent techniques are applied to understand a problem, design a solution, and deliver that solution to the market.

Design thinking also inspires new ways to measure the success of our efforts:

• Desirable – Do customers and end-users want the solution?
• Feasible – Can we deliver the right solution through a combination of build, buy, partner, or acquire activities?
• Viable – Is the way we build and offer the solution creating more value than cost? For example, in a for-profit enterprise, are we profitable?
• Sustainable – Are we proactively managing our solution to account for its expected product-market lifecycle?

Successive applications of design thinking advance the solution over its natural market lifecycle, as shown in Figure 2.

Understanding the Problem and Solution Space

In Figure 1, the core design thinking processes appear as a ‘double diamond.’ This represents the focus on thoroughly exploring the problem space before creating solutions. Each diamond focuses on divergent thinking (understanding and exploring options) followed by convergent thinking (evaluating options and making choices).

The activities associated with exploring the problem are elaborated as follows:

• Discover – The discover phase seeks to understand the problem by engaging in market and user research to identify unmet needs. This research creates fresh perspectives that drive innovation. Unlike research that confirms or refutes a hypothesis, the inquiries associated with the discovery phase occur without preconceived notions about how users should work. Instead, it focuses on how users work . An essential research technique is Gemba, also known as ‘going to the place where the work is done.’
• Define – The define phase focuses on the information gathered during the discover phase to generate insights into specific problems and unmet needs. These create opportunities for the business and new product development. Results of this phase typically include personas and empathy maps (described below) that focus the product team on the solutions the Customer would view as desirable. Epics and Features capture the perceived changes needed for existing products and solutions.

With a clear understanding of the target market and its problems, the focus can move toward designing a solution, the second diamond of design thinking. These are:

• Develop – The develop phase uses journey mapping, story mapping, and prototyping to design potential solutions to problems quickly and cost-effectively. Each of these techniques is discussed more thoroughly later in this article. The develop phase also embraces SAFe Principle #3 – Assume variability; preserve options. Design thinking techniques preserve options responsibly.
• Deliver – The deliver phase produces artifacts suitable for creating the solution and varies based on context. These artifacts often start as prototypes expressed as validated features in the ART Backlog for continuous delivery.

Using Personas to Focus Design

Creating solutions for a direct customer—bespoke solutions—offer designers the advantage of speaking directly and frequently with a few target users, permitting them to participate in the design, PI Planning , System Demos , and other SAFe events. In some organizations, Customers are considered part of the team, so creating a Persona to represent them isn’t typically needed but may be helpful when the organization is highly distributed.

In contrast, in an indirect customer market, which is common in B2C solutions, product teams need a way to maintain a connection with their target customers. So, they develop ‘personas,’ fictional consumers and users derived from user research. [2] They depict the people who might similarly use a product or solution, providing insights into how real users would engage with a solution. User personas also support market segmentation strategy by offering a concrete design tool to reinforce that products and solutions are created for people. Personas drive product development and several SAFe practices, as shown in Figure 3.

In addition to user personas, buyer personas extend design thinking to include the individuals and organizations that authorize purchasing decisions. They help ensure that the design encompasses the whole product purchase experience, including after-sales service, support, and operations.

Establishing Empathy to Foster Customer-Centric Design

Customer-centric enterprises use empathy throughout the design process. Empathetic design dismisses preconceived ideas and uses the Customer’s perspective to inform solution development.

Empathy maps [1] are a design thinking tool that promotes customer identification by helping teams develop a deep, shared understanding of others (Figure 4). They enable teams to imagine what a specific persona is thinking, feeling, hearing, and seeing as they use the product. The greater the degree of empathy a team has for its customers, the more likely it will be able to design desirable solutions.

Designing the User Experience through Journey Maps

A customer journey map illustrates the user experience in an Operational Value Stream that provides products and services. Figure 5 shows how these journey maps are powerful design thinking tools. They allow teams to identify ways the specific deliverables for one or more Development Value Streams can be improved to create a better end-to-end user experience.

Delivering Benefits Through Features

While a journey map captures the high-level experience of the Customer in the operational value stream, product features manage the specific deliverables that fulfill a stakeholder’s need. Features are commonly described through a features and benefits (FAB) matrix , using short phrases that provide context and a benefit hypothesis. Design thinking, however, promotes switching the order of the FAB to a benefit-feature matrix . In this case, the intended customer benefits are identified first, and then the teams determine what features might satisfy their needs. This approach helps Agile Teams explore better and faster ways to deliver the desired benefits (Figure 6).

Designing User Workflows or Journeys through Story Maps

Features that capture a workflow or user journey present a unique challenge to Agile teams. Because the backlog is a flat, one-dimensional list, it does not show the relationship between the user’s goals, workflow activities, and the stories in the backlog. Story mapping is a brainstorming technique that can enable teams to design a solution focused on the Customer. Not all features will require story mapping. However, they are particularly useful for developing new end-user functionality for a workflow or customer journey.

Why Story Maps?

Story maps help teams ideate, plan, and group activities in a workflow or user journey . They allow teams to address the most critical steps before improving existing steps or adding new functionality. Story maps are an important design thinking tool that enables Customer Centricity because they focus on delighting a user instead of merely implementing stories ordered by their value. Another benefit is avoiding releasing a feature (or solution) that is not usable because its functionality depends on stories that are lower in priority and further down the backlog.

Figure 7 illustrates how a feature with a workflow is captured in a story map [3], organizing the sequence of stories according to the activities (or steps) a user needs to accomplish their goal. The first set of stories is essential for the initial release, while the next set represents improvements for future releases.

How to Create a Story Map

The following steps describe the process of creating a story map (Figure 7) for a new potential Feature that requires a workflow.

• Frame the purpose : Identify the goal or customer problems the solution will solve and the intended users of the solution.
• Map the whole story : Define the starting conditions for the user to accomplish their goals. Focus on describing the whole story and user activities and tasks, creating the backbone of the story map.
• Brainstorm : Fill in the body of the story map by breaking down the larger user tasks into smaller subtasks and user interface details. Consider many possibilities without concern if the stories are in or out of scope. Affinity group the stories needed to complete the task under each activity.
• Identify the stories essential for the initial release : The team identifies which stories can be released (in the next iteration or two) that will achieve a meaningful user outcome.
• Identify stories considered as improvements in future releases : Stories that are not selected for the initial release will be added to the backlog as potential candidates for future releases.

Increasing Design Feedback Through Prototypes

A prototype is a basic functional model of a feature or product, usually built for demonstration purposes or as part of the development process. It helps the team clarify their understanding of the problem and reduces risk in designing and developing the solution before making further investments. Prototypes provide many benefits:

• Fast feedback. By definition, a prototype is cheaper and faster to produce than a complete solution. This enables faster feedback from users and customers, increased understanding of solution requirements, and greater confidence in the final designs.
• Risk reduction. Prototypes can reduce technical risk by enabling Agile teams to focus initial efforts on the aspects of the solution associated with the highest risk.
• Intellectual property/patent filing. Prototypes can be used to satisfy strategic requirements for managing intellectual property as early as possible in the development process.
• Models for requirements. Prototypes can provide more clarity in the requirements of the desired feature or solution than pages of documentation.

There are many kinds of prototypes, each optimized to provide different types of insights:

• Paper prototypes are typically hand-drawn sketches of the intended solution. They can be automated to illustrate workflows or validate user story maps.
• Mid-Fi prototypes are visually-complete representations of software-centric solutions but are not typically functionally integrated.
• Hi-Fi prototypes are visually-complete and interactive models which users and customers can directly explore.
• Hardware prototypes provide critical feedback on form factors, sizes, and operational requirements. For example, when exploring form factors to see how a new tablet might fit into existing backpacks, briefcases, and cars, one Silicon Valley company cut many plastic models from a single sheet of plastic. Later in this design process, this same team found they needed to redesign the power supply so that it would not unduly interfere with the WIFI signal.

Last updated: 13 February 2023

Privacy Overview

The journey to an agile organization

Agility is catching fire, and there is growing recognition of its transformational benefits. But moving to an agile operating model is tough, especially for established companies. There are several paths to agility and many different starting points, yet successful agile transformations  all share the common elements described in this paper.

Agile organizations are different. Traditional organizations are built around a static, siloed, structural hierarchy, whereas agile organizations are characterized as a network of teams operating in rapid learning and decision-making cycles. Traditional organizations place their governance bodies at their apex, and decision rights flow down the hierarchy; conversely, agile organizations instill a common purpose and use new data to give decision rights to the teams closest to the information. An agile organization can ideally combine velocity and adaptability with stability and efficiency .

Transforming to an agile operating model

Any enterprise-wide agile transformation needs to be both comprehensive and iterative. That is, it should be comprehensive in that it touches strategy, structure, people, process, and technology, and iterative in that not everything can be planned up front (Exhibit 1).

There are many different paths to enterprise agility. Some organizations are born agile—they use an agile operating model from the start. As for others, broadly put, we see three types of journeys to agile: All-in, which entails an organization-wide commitment to go agile and a series of waves of agile transformation; Step-wise, which involves a systematic and more discreet approach; and Emergent, which represents essentially a bottom-up approach.

Born-agile organizations are relatively common in the technology sector (for instance, Spotify or Riot Games 1 Stephen Denning, The Age of Agile: How Smart Companies Are Transforming the Way Work Gets Done , New York: AMACOM, 2018. ), with rare examples in other industries (Hilcorp, a North American oil and gas company, is a case in point ). Most organizations must undergo a transformation to embrace enterprise agility. Such transformations vary in pace, scope, and approach, but all contain a set of common elements across two broad stages (Exhibit 2).

First, successful transformations start with an effort to aspire, design, and pilot the new agile operating model. These elements can occur in any order and often happen in parallel. Second, the impetus to scale and improve involves increasing the number of agile cells. However, this involves much more than simply rolling out more pilots. Organizations may iterate among these stages as they roll out agility across more and more of their component parts.

Aspire, design, and pilot

Most transformations start with building the top team’s understanding and aspirations, creating a blueprint to identify how agility will add value, and learning through agile pilots. These three elements inform one another and often overlap.

Top-team aspiration

Successful agile transformations need strong and aligned leadership from the top . A compelling, commonly understood and jointly owned aspiration is critical for success.

The blueprint should, at first, be a minimum viable product developed in a fast-paced, iterative manner that gives enough direction for the organization to start testing the design.

Adopting an agile operating model can alleviate challenges in the current organization (such as unclear accountabilities, problematic interfaces, or slow decision making). Yet a desire to address pain points is not enough; there is a bigger prize. As one CEO observed, “I’d never have launched this agile transformation if I only wanted to remove pain points; we’re doing this because we need to fundamentally transform the company to compete in the future.” This aligns with McKinsey research showing that transformations emphasising both strengths and challenges are three times more likely to succeed.

To build the top team’s understanding and aspiration, nothing beats site visits to companies that have undergone an agile transformation. For example, the entire leadership team at a global telecommunications company contemplating an agile transformation invested a week to visit ING (a Dutch bank), TDC (a Danish telecommunications company), Spotify, Entel (a Chilean communications company), and others prior to launching an agile transformation. 2 Bo Krag Esbensen, Klemens Hjartar, David Pralong, and Olli Salo, “ A tale of two agile paths: How a pair of operators set up their organizational transformations ,” February 2019.

The blueprint for an agile operating model is much more than an organization chart and must provide a clear vision and design of how a new operating model might work (Exhibit 3). An agile transformation fundamentally changes the way work is done and, therefore, blueprinting also needs to identify changes to the people, processes, and technology elements of the operating model. The blueprint should, at first, be a minimum viable product developed in a fast-paced, iterative manner that gives enough direction for the organization to start testing the design.

The first step in blueprinting is to get clear on where the value lies. All operating-model design must be grounded in an understanding of how value is created in the industry and how the individual organization creates value. This fundamentally links to strategy.

Next comes structure. An agile organization doesn’t deliver work according to a classic organization chart; rather, it can be thought of as a series of cells (or “teams,” “squads,” or “pools”) grouped around common missions, often called “tribes.” The blueprinting element should produce a “tribe map” to illustrate how individuals that are grouped get work done, as well as a more recognizable organization chart to show the capability axis along which common skill sets are owned and managed (Exhibit 4).

Individual agile cells are defined by outcomes or missions rather than by input actions or capabilities. Teams performing different types of missions will likely use different agile models. However, three types of agile cells are most common. First, cross-functional teams deliver products, projects, or activities. These have the knowledge and skills within the team and should have a mission representing end-to-end delivery of the associated value stream. The “squads and tribes” model developed by Spotify and used by ING , among others, is one example. Second, self-managing teams deliver baseload activity and are relatively stable over time. These teams define the best way to set goals, prioritize activities, and focus effort. Lean-manufacturing teams or maintenance crews could be examples of this agile approach. Indeed, more broadly, lean-management tools and practices are highly complementary with enterprise agility. Third, flow-to-work pools of individuals are staffed full time to different tasks based on the priority of the need. Functional teams like HR or scarce resources like enterprise architects are often seen as “flow” resources.

One telecommunications company identified five major activities across their business and selected an agile approach for each: channel and delivery units (for example, stores) were organized as self-managing teams to increase local flexibility with joint accountability; segment ownership, product development, and enabling teams were organized in cross-functional squads and tribes; and centers of excellence for all other activities (including subject-matter experts and corporate support activities) combined flow-to-work and temporary cross-functional teams for specific tasks.

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Working in teams may sound familiar, but at scale this requires change across the whole operating model to provide appropriate governance and coordination. The organizational backbone comprises the stable components of an agile operating model that are essential to enable agile teams. Typically, these backbone elements include core processes (for example, talent management, budgeting, planning, performance management, and risk), people elements (including a North Star , 3 To give coherence and focus to their distributed value creation models, agile organizations set a shared purpose and vision—“the North Star”—for the organization that helps people feel personally and emotionally invested. core values, and expected leadership behaviors), and technology components. In trying to scale up, many agile transformations fail by simply launching more agile teams without addressing these backbone elements.

The final step of blueprinting is to outline the implementation road map. This road map should contain, at minimum, a view on the overall scope and pace of the transformation, and the list (or “backlog”) of tasks.

The five steps of the blueprint form a coherent approach. A commercial insurer in North America used an agile blueprint to accelerate innovation of digital and business processes. It defined a chapter-based organization structure and created a new organization of product managers (who played product-owner roles in agile teams) to guide teams toward business outcomes. They defined a team structure mostly aligned to customer and internal user journeys, with dedicated teams to grow selected businesses. They created a stable planning and performance-management backbone, as well as a culture of risk taking, and they used an 18-month road map to create all the new positions, train personnel in the new roles, and implement the change in full.

Nothing convinces skeptical executives like teams of their own employees having verifiable impact through agile working. For example, one oil and gas company launched a series of agile pilots through which cross-functional teams managed to design wells in 50 to 75 percent less time than the historical average.

Agile pilots

The purpose of a pilot is to demonstrate the value of agile ways of working through tangible business outcomes. Early experiments may be limited to individual teams, but most pilots involve multiple teams to test the broader elements of enterprise agility. Nothing convinces skeptical executives like teams of their own employees having verifiable impact through agile working. For example, one oil and gas company launched a series of agile pilots through which cross-functional teams managed to design wells in 50 to 75 percent less time than the historical average.

Initially, the scope of the agile pilot must be defined and the team set up with a practical end in view; this might include deciding on team staffing, structure, workspace, facilities, and resources. Next, the way the agile pilot will run must be outlined with respect to structure, process, and people; this is typically collated in a playbook that forms the basis for communications with those in the pilot.

Scale and improve

Agile transformations acknowledge that not everything can be known and planned for, and that the best way to implement is to adjust as you go.

Scaling beyond a few pilots is no small feat; this is where most agile transformations fail. It requires recognition from leadership that scale-up will require an iterative mind-set: learning is rapidly incorporated in the scale-up plan. In this, enough time is required—a significant portion of key leaders’ time—as well as willingness to role model new mind-sets and behaviors. Agile transformations acknowledge that not everything can be known and planned for, and that the best way to implement is to adjust as you go. For example, a leading European bank first deployed four “frontrunner” tribes to test the blueprint in action and adapted important elements of the blueprint across the delivery enterprise. Such an iterative rollout approach enables continuous refinement based on constant feedback and capability building for key roles across the organization, including agile coaches, product owners, scrum masters, and leadership.

Agile cell deployment and support

Agile scale-up first and foremost requires standing up more agile cells. However, an organization can’t pilot its way to enterprise agility. The transformation should match the organizational cadence, context, and aspiration. But at some point, it is necessary to leap toward the new agile operating model, ways of working, and culture. For large organizations, this need not be a day one for the entirety but will likely progress through a series of waves.

Many chose to start by transforming their headquarters and product-development organizations before touching frontline, customer-facing units (call centers, stores, or manufacturing facilities). It is possible to transform one factory or one end-to-end customer journey at a time, but highly interconnected functions in the headquarters may need an All-in transition approach.

The size and scope of waves depend on the context and aspiration. For example, a large Eastern European bank designed waves of nine months, where the diagnostic, design, and selection for 10 tribes, 150 squads, and 1,500 roles were performed in the first three months and then deployed over a six-month period, launching a new tribe every two weeks. Furthermore, the scale-up effort was a top priority for C-suite executives, which dedicated more than 10 percent of their time to the transformation.

Resources to support new agile cells—for example, availability of agile coaches or appropriate workspace—can often limit the speed of scale-up. Failure to address the support of new agile cells can cause friction and delay in the transformation.

Backbone transformation

Reflecting on its agile experience before scaling up, one executive observed: “Most of our agile pilots are working despite, rather than supported by, our broader organizational ‘wiring’ [processes, systems, and even beliefs and values] that forms what we call the backbone of an organization.” The backbone governs how decisions get made; how people, budgets, and capital get deployed; and how risk gets managed. Taking an organization to an agile operating model requires that this backbone be transformed (Exhibit 5).

Capability accelerator

Successfully scaling an agile operating model requires new skills, behaviors, and mind-sets across the organization. This is vitally important and constitutes an intensive phase of an agile transformation. Most organizations require existing staff to take on these new roles or responsibilities, and as such, need a way to build new skills and capabilities. Specifically, any successful agile transformation will invariably create a capability accelerator to retrain and reorganize staff, make the agile idea common to all, and develop the right skills across the organization.

Agile Organizations

A typical capability journey may well have distinct phases. First, organizations need to identify the number of trainers (agile coaches) required, and then hire and develop them; a failure to do so can cause delay and blockage when the agile transformation extends across the whole organization. Second, as part of building capabilities, the organization must define the new agile roles (agile coaches, product owners, tribe leads, chapter leads, and product owners, for example), along with a clear idea of what success looks like in each role. Third, learning and career paths should be set for all staff, making clear the opportunities that the agile transformation opens up. Fourth, the organization needs to enable continuous learning and improvement across the organization (this will entail a large-scale digital and communications program). Finally, it’s necessary to design and run a whole-organization effort to raise agile skills (often by means of intensive boot camps) and ensure that new staff are onboarded appropriately. Larger organizations often set up an academy to consolidate and formalize these functions.

The importance of investing in culture and change on the journey to agility cannot be overstated. Agile is, above all, a mind-set. Without the right mind-set, all other parts of the agile operating system can be in place, and yet companies will see few benefits.

Focusing on culture and the change team

A culture and change team is an essential coordinating element of an agile transformation. But it is not a traditional project-management office; rather, the emphasis should be on enabling the other transformation elements, helping to remove impediments and catalyzing culture change.

As an example, Roche, a global healthcare company, launched a global leadership initiative as a central component of its transformation to become a more agile enterprise . It designed a four-day program with a combined focus on personal and organizational transformation. More than 4,000 leaders have now been touched by the effort, helping to shift the collective consciousness and capabilities for leaders to deliver the change.

The importance of investing in culture and change on the journey to agility cannot be overstated. Agile is, above all, a mind-set. Without the right mind-set, all other parts of the agile operating system can be in place, and yet companies will see few benefits. In contrast, when leaders and teams have a strong agile mind-set, then a clear aspiration alone is often enough for a successful agile operating model to emerge.

Understanding transformation archetypes

All successful enterprise-wide agile transformations include the elements described above, but there are several different ways in which the elements can be combined and sequenced. As introduced earlier, there are three major transformation archetypes:

• Step-wise. Transforming to an agile organization often feels like a step into the dark for senior leaders. Perhaps understandably, then, the most common transformation archetype shows a clear distinction between the aspire, design, and pilot phase and the scale and improve phase. Many companies will run multiple rounds of pilots and iterate their blueprint several times before fully committing to scaling up across a large part of the organization. It is not uncommon for this process to take one to two years, as leaders and the organization build familiarity with agility and prove to themselves that agile ways of working can bring value in their organization. Organizations may well go through several subsequent rounds of aspire, design, and pilot before scaling up elsewhere.
• All-in. Although less common, an increasing number of organizations gain strong conviction early on and fully commit up front to move the whole organization to an agile model. Leaders from these organizations define a plan to execute all steps of the transformation approach as quickly as possible. Even in these types of transformation it is rare for the whole organization to transform to an agile model in a single “big bang”; rather, it is more common for the transformation to proceed through a number of planned waves.
• Emergent. It is impossible—and not very agile—to plan out an agile transformation in detail from the start. Instead, most agile transformations have emergent elements. Some organizations have chosen to progress their entire agile transformation through an emergent, bottom-up approach. In this archetype, an aspiration from top leaders sets a clear direction, and significant effort is spent building agile mind-sets and capabilities among leaders.

“It’s like this,” one CEO explained. “We are 3,000 people on a giant cruise ship. But what we need to be is 3,000 people in a few hundred yachts. So, how do I get my people safely into those smaller boats?” As is increasingly common, the discussion had moved from if an agile operating model was applicable to how leaders could help their organization transform. Navigating an organization to an agile operating model is not easy. The elements of an agile transformation described in this article provide a guide.

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Daniel Brosseau is a partner in McKinsey’s Montreal office, Sherina Ebrahim is a senior partner in the New Jersey office, and Christopher Handscomb is a partner in the London office, where Shail Thaker is a senior partner.

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