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Why Agile Methodolgy?

March 30, 2023 by Alexander Brown

As a project leader, you know that Agile methodology is essential for successful software development. User story mapping is a prioritizing technique that helps teams understand the user’s needs and plan the development process. At FeatureMap.co, we offer an agile tool that simplifies user story mapping and streamlines the software development process. In this post, we’ll discuss the advantages of Agile methodology and explain how our tool can help you achieve your project goals.

What is Agile Methodology?

Agile methodology is a software development methodology that emphasizes flexibility, collaboration, and continuous improvement. Unlike traditional Waterfall methodology, which involves a linear approach to software development, Agile methodology involves iterative development and testing.

Agile methodology offers numerous advantages, including faster time-to-market, improved quality, increased customer satisfaction, and reduced risk. By using Agile methodology, teams can respond quickly to changing requirements and deliver software that meets the user’s needs.

User Story Mapping

User story mapping is a prioritizing technique that helps teams understand the user’s needs and plan the development process. It involves breaking down the user’s requirements into small, manageable stories that can be completed in an Agile sprint. User story mapping ensures that the development team is focused on delivering features that are valuable to the user.

For example, imagine that you are developing a project management tool. Your user stories might include creating tasks, assigning tasks to team members, and tracking progress. By breaking down the user’s requirements into small stories, you can prioritize the features that will provide the most value to the user.

The Benefits of Using FeatureMap

At FeatureMap, we offer an Agile development software that simplifies user story mapping and streamlines the software development process. Our tool offers a collaborative environment that allows teams to work together seamlessly, ensuring that everyone is on the same page.

Our tool is easy to use, even for teams that are new to Agile methodology. With real-time tracking and prioritizing features, our tool ensures that everyone is working towards the same project goals.

How FeatureMap’s Tool Can Help with Agile Project Plans

Our tool offers numerous benefits to Agile project planning, including:

Prioritizing features: Our tool makes it easy to prioritize features based on user needs, ensuring that the development team is focused on delivering features that provide the most value.

Creating a shared understanding: FeatureMap helps teams all get on the same page by seeing the visual big picture.

Story points in Jira: Our tool integrates with Jira, allowing teams to track their progress and estimate the time required to complete each task.

Real-time tracking: Our tool offers real-time tracking of progress, allowing teams to identify and address issues quickly.

So what next?

Agile methodology is essential for successful software development, and user story mapping is a key prioritizing technique that helps teams deliver software that meets the user’s needs. FeatureMap’s Agile development software offers numerous benefits, including a streamlined development process, a collaborative environment, and real-time tracking. If you’re looking to improve your Agile project plans, we encourage you to try it out free today.

User Story vs User Journey

March 30, 2023October 7, 2022 by Alexander Brown

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 best to plan your product development

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.

Step One

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.

Creating the backbone of your user story map

Step Two

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

Adding your epics and activities to your use story mapping

Step Three

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.

Project Development is aided by this full user story map

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.

High-Level Understanding – Utilising Aggregation in FeatureMap

December 22, 2021 by Alexander Brown

User Story Mapping and FeatureMap

User story mapping can allow your team to see and understand the product from a user-centric design. You can see the bigger picture of the product, help the team identify gaps and dependencies, and give the first framework of a shared understanding between your entire team.

A finished FeatureMap Board should have your entire product outlined. The team will have sections separated, and you’ll be scheduling and planning the outline of prioritized stories into sprints and releases.

In this article, we will share how to gain a better shared understanding of a map by utilising the feature of aggregation.

In short, it is the option of aggregating values. On each card you can assign a status, estimation and a budget. When you assign the aggregation option to a header card, the card will gather the values of all sub cards and calculate, dynamically, the overall status or number.

Here you can see the FeatureMap Board of the Audio Finder Product, fully incorporated with aggregation of both status and time.

A beautiful map, full of information, which can be daunting, but with ease you can see if the product development has any issues just by looking at the aggregated dynamic values on each of the layer headers.

Let’s break it down.

Status Aggregation

With Status, you are able to assign to a card, displaying a coloured icon on the main map. Great for that easy acquisition when viewing the larger map.

The statuses you can apply are: Todo, Ongoing, Done, Cancelled, Blocked.

With FeatureMap you can set statues to all cards to help with task management. — The Card – Register Online: Applying a status for the state of its task.

With aggregation, you can apply the option “automatic (aggregated)” on your header cards, and the header card will a value by priority to display allowing the team to see each header, and associated higher task status.

A quick glance at a busy map can be even quicker with good application of status icons, and aggregation allowing you to identify issues and solve them quickly. This is one huge advantage for those busy product owners or leads 😇

The priority for aggregation display is by importance: Blocked -> Ongoing -> Done.

When a card is set to “To-Do” and “Ongoing” are is aggregated as “Ongoing”.

When a column or layer has a “Blocked” card, this takes priority and is aggregated as “Blocked” as to draw attention to issues.

When all cards within a column/layer are done, the aggregated value draws “Done”.

The status “Cancelled” is ignored.

The header card (groups) Sign Up has been set to an automatic (aggregated) value.

The sub headers (lists), Sign Up and Registration are also set to automatic (aggregated).

The cards in those columns have all be seen set with “Done” status.

The value will dynamically be displayed based on the values of the cards within the sub-cards.

In this case, FeatureMap draws the values from Register Online and Email Confirmation.

Both are “Done”, so the value aggregated is “Done.”

Budget and Estimation Aggregation

The task status is not the only aggregation option. You can also track your assigned values of budget and estimation.

When you assign numbers to a card, and then aggregation to the header. It will draw vertically to each header group and list or, if applied to a layer header, it will draw horizontally to each layer. This allows you to see the overall bigger picture, but also a specific collection of times, costs or the main status of the project.

In this FeatureMap we are utilising Aggregation.

On the User Management Section, we are not aggregating status instead we are estimating the time it will take for our developers to code the described section.

You can see the Dashboard Options Card is estimated to take 15 hours, and the Dynamic Windows Card is estimated to take 20 hours.

The header above – Dashboard draws those numbers and calculates both, giving us 35 hours. At a quick glance, the team now know the Dashboard feature should be done after 35 hours.

This aggregates higher to the USER MANAGEMENT header as well, showing us the value of 76 as it draws all estimations in it’s sub lists of Dashboard, Interact with Review and Social Media Elementals.

Customising the Aggregation Options.

On both Estimation and Budget, you can rename the labels of these fields and assign units.

If you decide to do this after the fact, worry not, you can assign the field settings to a single card, or all cards on the map when editing the options.

The list of options available when customising your fields.

To edit, open up a card and click the grey cog wheel next to the Estimation or Budget field.

Here you can rename the fields, and assign units.

Units available are:

none (default)
points (pts)
EUR (€)
USD ($)
weeks (w)
days (d)
hours (h)

I settled on Estimation and used the units as “hours”.

Apply to all cards please, and let my map be beautifully informative.

Vertical or Horizontal

Aggregation can be applied horizontally or vertically.

When you apply it to the Group and List Headers (Vertically) the aggregation will be drawn from the entire column, spanning every sprint or value.

As such, it is much more common to see the aggregation applied horizontally to see the Sprint status.

Aggregate up or across. Dynamically see your sprints and tasks.

Aggregation Helps

A user story map need not be static. Teams can update it with findings from research spikes, revised estimations, and user feedback from sprints and releases. The story map can also be used as a visual roadmap to communicate both the planned work and the work that remains.

So if you find yourself as a product owner or project manager wondering the status of your developers, and you want to avoid it interrupting them distracting them or holding unnecessary meetings, the aggregation tool is invaluable for your management.

It allows your developers to keep you updated while allowing an optimal level of communication. Maybe they’ll get more done? 😀

Give aggregation a go, you’ll be surprised how much control it gives to your map. You can access aggregation options with a Premium Subscription, or with the free sign-up trial.

Happy Mapping!

User Story Mapping – Steps to Success

September 25, 2018 by Alexander Brown

User Story Mapping has been described as a niche tool to achieve much. Tools for product development, feature definition, version improvement and project management just to name a few.

In this case we are looking at the steps to success, utilising User Story Mapping methodology to help define your path. The first two steps instantly reward.

Firstly, planning the map rewards you a pathway to the point so that you can start writing user stories (a user story is a short description of something your customer will do when using your product).

Secondly, the end result is a visual chart showing the structure of your stories which gives you the steps to development.

Here is another way to approach User Story Mapping in three steps and this is a relatively quick way of getting to a point to start development work.

Hosting your Story Mapping Session

Because User Story Mapping can come across as complex it is important that management of the session is approached with a framework. Needless to say that User Story Mapping can be a new tool for most people so outlining what it is all about and describing the process is important.

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

Step One

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.

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. Thats fine, you’ll have duplicates, and these should sit beside each other on the line (not above or below). As you expand and learn you can easily drag and drop and delete if needed. The beauty of using digital software for large collaberation tasks such as this allows you and you and your team to easily edit, expand and develop your map.

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

Step Two

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

Step Three

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 redifining tasks. This may include adding tasks, merging tasks or seperating 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/actitives) 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.

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 can do this all with Post-It notes with your in house team, or digitally using FeatureMap.co with your teams remotely and digitially.

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

How to re-write your Legacy Application using Story Mapping

May 1, 2018 by Alexander Brown

People often mistake User Story Mapping as a tool to start projects, but it is entirely suitable for building up an old project or design.

When looking at your application it is easy to first create User Story Map based on the products functions.

Establish the tasks, the goals and flesh out the map. Sometimes you may taken things for granted and forget certain tools of the application are actually tasks so it’s a good idea to bring in people from other teams to help identify all the functions of your project.

Build the map, identifiying all the functions.

We once took an old tool and needed to update the codebase, as well as introduce new features and improvements.

A few options may be available to you, depending on the code. Are you able to update the tool in sections? Are you able to approach the update in sprints/versions? Do you need to rebuild the entire program from scratch?

We first built the map of our tool, you can see below our “Moviebuddy” example.

We then worked through identifying which sections were redundant. We identified these and added them to a new column to the side. Essentially removing them from view.

We then talked out and identified which parts of the code would be updated and what we could do first. We labelled this as version 1 and aimed to get the core functions updated.

Identifying what we should upgrade first in Version 1

We were able to identify one function which we were able to upgrade. We also added new cards which reminded us to update our code standards and highlighted them green to ensure they were completed.

We then moved along to the next version which allowed us to introduce our new payment gateway to the application. A function that had alluded us due to the old codebase.

Adding a new Codebase column and moving to version 1.5

This allowed us to deploy more frequently and provide value sooner as we updated sections of the site. We still had a lot of ‘old legacy code’ but as we added new features we moved the legacy code functions inline with our updates.

As you can see using User Story Mapping can be brand new projects, or old existing projects.

Moviebuddy is all fictional for the purpose of training.

User Story Mapping : From Idea to MVP

April 27, 2018January 2, 2018 by Alexander Brown

When we look at User Story Mapping, you may think of the backlog of user stories, or how it can be a great methodolgy to reduce and refine your current project or product flow. But User Story Mapping doesn’t just need to be a tool applied to a backlog heavy project. It can be used to refine an idea to a product.

Refine the Idea

Take the product and ask yourself and your team these questions:

What is the overall idea?
Who are the customers?
Who are the end users?
Why would they want it?
Why are we building it?

Find out what the project and product is for, validate your reasoning, search for problems, take the steps now to refine your idea.

Build to Learn

With the initial idea fleshed out, first build your product with the aim to learn. A less than MVP (Minimum Viable Product), a product that covers the simple basis for your users.

With this stage you do not want to market, push or give out the product as “The product” but to a small group of users. Ideally users you spoke to initally that may have sparked the idea of the product.

As part of this step you need to harvest the feedback, and constantly refine your idea. Build wants but be care ful to actually listen to what the user wants.

At this stage metrics will help as it is common people will fall into a loose three categories:

The Polite Enabler. — The user who says everything is great, but doesnt use the product.
The Complainer. — The user who sends in lists of feedback and demands, but actually uses the product.
The Mute. — The user who uses the product and says nothing.

The polite user is probably the worst for building to learn, with the complainer being your favourite user. However be careful the complainer is not just demanding features that detract or do nothing.

The Mute you’ll need to reach out, engage and ask for feedback with offered incentives. The mute can be valuable.

Applying to Story Mapped Backlog

You now have your project released, some feedback and ideas of how to take it from big idea to big success.

We recommend organising a horizontal strip of User Actitives. You will have this from the first step, and the questions. This will form the backbone and be the foundation of your map.

Below in vertical strips arrange into three tiers:

Current Relase
Next Release(s)
Future Ideas

Each card will have indepth details about the feature.

Then when organised, take the highest priority stories or layers and move into the current sprint.

This is one great way to take Idea to MVP.

Common Pitfalls

I might write a piece entirely about the pitfalls I see new projects and products fall to when designing their story map and MVP.

Perfection — When designing a product do not focus and lose yourself to the “Just one more feature” which adds time and bloat to inital ideas.
Make a skateboard first — When making a car, first design a skateboard that allows the user to at least get somewhere. Do not fall into the trap of building car parts with no method to go.

To illustrate this Henrik Kniberg wrote an article talking about how he prefers “Earliest Testable/Usable/Lovable” over MVP.

Validate your MVP

When designing your product, each sprint sent to product should be reviewed, measured and with feedback and data — learn.

With that learn knowledge refine your idea.

With that refined idea, revamp your MVP and build.

Build — MVP
Measure — Get feedback and data
Refine — Improve with better ideas
Repeat — Back to Build.

With User Story Mapping this is easy, especially when using a tool like FeatureMap.co as the ease and flow of a team all working, moving and adjusting cards on the fly makes it invaluable.