DEEP: The 4 Characteristics of a Good Product Backlog

Whether you’re planning your first user story mapping session or you’ve got a few under your belt, it can be a little overwhelming 🤯

• What’s the process?
• Who do I need to get involved?
• Why are we even bothering with this when we have a perfectly good backlog? (Okay… it might be slightly dysfunctional, but you know...)
• Why are there sticky notes EVERYWHERE?

Most product managers and Agile teams could benefit from a deeper understanding of user story mapping so they can create a more customer-centered view of the work that needs to be done.

Plus, over the last 15 years (since user story maps started to become a thing thanks to Jeff Patton), some of the processes and terms have evolved and there are new tools and apps that can make your life a whooooole lot easier.

We’ve put together this ultimate guide with all the info you need to get up to speed on the latest user story mapping definitions, techniques, and tools. Let’s start with some basics 👇

What is user story mapping?

Here’s a super simple user story mapping definition:

User story mapping is a visualization of the journey a customer takes with a product, from beginning to end. It includes all the tasks they’d typically complete as part of that journey.

To expand on that, user story mapping takes all your user stories (across all your persona types) and assigns them to epics in the order that delivers the most value to the customer. From there, stories are prioritized and mapped to releases.

“User story mapping is a facilitated, curated conversation that brings everyone along for the journey. It’s an opportunity for the product manager to brain dump their insights (who is deep in this stuff day in, day out) and get it into the minds of the team who are about to deliver on it.”

Nicholas Muldoon, Co-Founder @Easy Agile

What isn’t user story mapping?

While user story mapping might have a few things in common with other methods, it’s not the same as journey mapping or event storming.

User story mapping vs journey mapping

Journey mapping is a UX tool that helps teams visualize the journey a customer needs to take so they can accomplish a goal. Journey maps focus on the journey for a single persona or customer, based on the persona’s specific scenario and expectations. This is useful for aligning the team, getting them focused on the user experience, and basing decisions. Unlike user story mapping, it’s focused on the user experience and the vision for the product.

User story mapping vs event storming

Event storming involves running a workshop with key business stakeholders present. The attendees write down business events (things that happen), commands (things that trigger the events), and reactions (things that happen as a result) on sticky notes. These notes are organized sequentially to map out the business processes. Unlike user story mapping, which is focused on refining the backlog to deliver a working product for the user, event storming is more high-level and done early in the product planning process.

User story mapping for agile teams

User story maps can be useful for all agile teams, whether they’re full SAFe or Kanban, but especially if they’re working on a complex product.

User story mapping is a useful technique for agile software development teams because it can help your team deliver working software and espond to change.

This fits right in with the Agile Manifesto.

And let’s not forget the number one agile principle:

“Our highest priority is to satisfy the customer through early and continuous delivery of valuable software.”

User story mapping puts the focus on the user, ensuring that the backlog contains stories that add real value to the customer by helping them achieve their goals. Plus, story mapping allows your team to plan and order their work so that it delivers the highest value to customers first.

Moreover, because Agile is all about embracing and reacting to change over following a concrete plan, story maps better facilitate efficient adaptation. It’s far easier to swap out sticky notes than it is to revise hefty requirements documents. This flexibility ensures that your team can swiftly adjust priorities and modify plans as new information or changes arise, maintaining alignment with Agile principles.

The anatomy of a user story map

User stories, epics, the backbone and story mapping - oh my! To break down the steps and processes involved in user story mapping down further, let’s define some of its moving parts.

User stories

A user story is a goal, from the user or customer’s perspective. It’s an outcome they want. It’s also the smallest unit of work in an agile framework with the purpose of articulating how a piece of work will deliver value back to the customer.

User stories usually follow the structure:

As a [persona type], I want to [action] so that [benefit].

For example:

Tip: it’s a good idea to focus on just one type of user/persona during your user story mapping session. If it’s your first session, choose your most ideal customer type and write our user stories that will deliver value to them. You can always come back to your other users in future.

Read ➡️ How to write good user stories in agile software development.

Epics

Stories can be associated with epics.

Epics have different meanings depending on who you talk to. But for the sake of this article, we’ll define epics as bigger, overarching stories or steps in the journey that contain user stories. An epic on its own isn’t small enough to become a work item or development task, but the stories it contains probably are.

For example, the epic “Sign up” might contain the following user stories:

• As a customer, I want to read the privacy policy before I sign up for my account so I can decide whether I trust the company with my details
• As a customer, I want to see a list of features and benefits on the sign-up page to remind me about what I’m signing up for
• As a customer, I want to sign up for an account using my Facebook login so I don’t have to remember my username or password
• As a customer, I want to sign up for an account using my email address so I can control access to my information
• And in this example, the next epic might be “Set up and customize my profile”.

The backbone

The backbone is the top row of your user story map. It outlines the essential capabilities the system needs to have.

Your backbone should show the customer journey or process from beginning to end, including all the high level activities the customer will complete while using your product. Depending on how you use your backbone and story map, it could be made up of epics.

The backbone is critical because it gives your team the “why” behind the journey, even if they’re just focused on a single step. It takes away ambiguity around what might lead up to that step and what might follow it, which gives important context for creating a smooth customer journey.

More on: The Anatomy of a User Story Map

Why do user story mapping?

The purpose of user story mapping is to make sure you understand the problem the customer has, and then find a solution to that problem.

You’ll know the answer to:

• Why are we building this?
• Who are we building this for?
• What value will it provide them?
• When do we expect to deliver this?

This will help align your teams, groom the backlog, and more quickly deliver a product that your customers want and need.

John Walpole explains the value of user stories beautifully:

“[There’s] one technique and tool which time and time again I’ve gone back to when I felt like a project maybe isn’t thoroughly understood by the team, or I’m worried that we’re going to end up shipping software that isn’t going to delight customers. This is my go-to technique. I believe it’s going to help you ship software that will delight your customers.”

Without user story mapping, there’s a much greater chance that your team will come up with complicated, non-customer-focused solutions to a problem.

User story mapping helps ensure the team is aligned around what problem the customer has, and how you, as a team, are going to try and solve that problem.

It will keep you focused on delivering the highest impact and greatest value pieces first, enabling you to iterate based on feedback.

Read ➡️ Why User Story Mapping

Benefits of user story mapping

“User story mapping is the best technique I’ve come across to gain shared understanding within an agile team. Alex Hennecke at Atlassian talked about being able to see the forest - instead of just the trees, right in front of him.”

Nicholas Muldoon, Co-Founder @Easy Agile

User-story maps are powerful tools in product development, particularly when it comes to identifying and managing risky assumptions.

Visualizing risk

User-story maps provide a visual framework that highlights potential risks. By mapping out user stories with sticky notes or digital alternatives, it's easy to pinpoint areas where assumptions might not align with real user data or technical feasibility. This visualization helps teams identify elements that could derail a project’s timeline or budget.

Prioritization and resource allocation

Once risky assumptions are identified, user-story maps allow teams to reorganize priorities effectively. Risky elements can be moved to a lower priority, ensuring that resources are allocated to ideas that offer high value with minimized risk. This strategy ensures that projects remain on track, focusing on what's realistically achievable.

Encouraging lean alternatives

Story maps encourage teams to explore lean alternatives first. By testing simpler ideas with similar value propositions, teams can validate concepts without significant investment. This approach allows for learning and iterating, reducing the likelihood of costly failures later in the development process.

Fostering collaborative problem-solving

The process of creating and updating a user-story map is inherently collaborative. It invites diverse team members to contribute insights, leading to more comprehensive risk identification and resolution strategies. By pooling knowledge, teams are better equipped to address assumptions that might otherwise go unnoticed.

Incorporating these practices into your product development cycle can help mitigate risks early, ensuring a smoother path from inception to launch.

There are so many other benefits to user story mapping too, like:

• Plan better - Seeing the user journey mapped out makes it easier for teams to see the big picture of your product and identify any risks, dependencies, and blocks ahead of time
• Greater empathy - It forces your team to see the product from your users’ perspective
• More value sooner - Frequently delivering new value to users is easier when you can order the stories based on value and map them to iterations or releases
• Realistic requirements - By breaking user stories down and visually mapping them, it’s easier to estimate work and see how all the pieces fit together
• Better cross-functional collaboration - With all the upcoming work mapped out, marketing, sales, and other teams can see when you expect to ship new features and updates so they can adjust their marketing communications and sales conversations (without asking you for daily updates)

User story mapping helps your team understand the bigger picture, the why, and the end-to-end customer journey before they dive into the what and how.

Read ➡️ Understand what your customers want with agile user story maps.

‍

The flat backlog vs user story mapping

Before we had user story mapping, we had the flat backlog. Actually, a lot of agile teams still use the flat backlog (no judgement if this is you!). So, let’s talk about what that looks like and how user story mapping has improved this practice.

Read ➡️ DEEP: The 4 Characteristics of a Good Product Backlog

What’s a flat backlog?

Essentially, it’s a to-do list. It includes all the items your team needs to do so they can provide value to your customers, ordered from most valuable to least valuable to the customer. The backlog may be split into current and future sprints to show what outputs are likely to be delivered when.

But I like our backlog!

A simple to do list might be fine if your product is simple, your team is small, and your to-do list is very short. But most products are complex, with multiple teams working on it. And most of the time, the backlog is massive (and constantly growing and changing).

Flat backlogs are complex at scale

If you’ve got hundreds of issues (or more), a flat backlog makes it impossible to see the big picture and surrounding context - which your team needs in order to refine the backlog, find dependencies, and prioritize the work into releases. It can also get pretty overwhelming!

• Specific challenges of using the flat backlog include:
• Arranging user stories in the order you’ll build them doesn’t help you explain to others what the system does
• It provides no context or ‘big picture’ around the work a team is doing
• For a new system, the flat backlog is poor at helping you determine if you’ve identified all the stories
• Release planning is difficult with a flat backlog - how do you prioritize what to build first when you’ve got an endless list?
• It’s virtually impossible to discover the ‘backbone’ of your product

User story maps were designed to overcome these challenges and restructure the backlog to add context, make it easier to prioritize, and put the focus on the customers’ needs. It introduces the X axis, with the backbone at the top to show the customer journey, and the user stories below.

When you go from a flat backlog to multiple axes, your team (and the rest of your organization) can understand what value we intend to deliver to the customer and when.

Read ➡️ The difference between a flat product backlog and a user story map.

When is user story mapping done?

So, when do you actually run a user story mapping session?

Generally, a team will collaboratively create a story map at the start of a project or product. It might be an entirely new product, or the product manager might want to pursue a new idea or feature as part of an existing product.

This involves getting subject matter experts and team members together to run a session where you look at your personas and overarching customer journey, then brainstorm ways you can provide the most value to customers. Then you’ll write user stories for each of your persona types and each step of the journey, based on their needs.

As we’ve already mentioned, it’s best to focus on one persona type per story mapping session to avoid confusion. So, start with the persona who is the best fit for your product or likely represent the largest chunk of your audience first.

Overall, the process could take several days or even several weeks, depending on the complexity of your product (and therefore, the number of steps in the customer journey) and the number of personas.

Getting the most out of User Story Mapping

Who should participate in user story mapping?

Some folks you might invite to your user story mapping party session include your:

• Subject matter experts (whether product owner, product manager, customer support team member, or someone else who interacts with the customer)
• Business owner
• Developers
• Testers
• Marketer
• UX designer
• Facilitator or Scrum Master (it’s useful if you can get another product manager to facilitate the session)

Tip: Try to keep your numbers below 10 participants. Diverse perspectives are useful, but any more than that and it can get tricky to manage and get input from everyone. All the people present should be able to contribute insights into the personas/product/business, or help estimate how long tasks will take to complete.

Mapping the user stories

Once the backbone is established (and your team agrees on the order), you can put the flesh on it. Under each item in the backbone, go the user stories (steps, processes, and details) that support that activity. This involves some brainstorming and creative thinking.

Encourage your team to imagine the different options available to the user, how they might want to experience each step in the backbone, and actions they might take. It can't hurt to do a paper prototyping session alongside your user story map to mock up ideas as you go. Or perhaps that step will come later, depending on the scenario and maturity of your team.

Sequencing

Then you can put your user stories in a sequence to deliver maximum value to the customer as quickly and consistently as possible. So, put the most important user stories at the top, and the least important ones at the bottom.

Cut lines or swimlanes

Your team will get together and discuss and estimate the work involved in each user story. After that, you can add cut lines (usually sprint or version lines) to mark out what your team will deliver and when. At this point, you might shuffle some stories around if it makes sense for the user to get them in the same release.

Read ➡️ Anatomy of an agile user story map.

Tips for successful user story mapping

Involve the right people

It can be tricky to get your team and stakeholders together. They’re busy and probably have a plate full of commitments. But it’s always worth getting everyone to set aside time and step away from the keyboard. User story mapping is important - and you’ll need input from everyone so you can:

• Brainstorm stories then prioritize and estimate them
• Get your team to commit to implementing them

Break it up

“Typically, I’d run these things to try and get as much of the planning, personas, and backbone done on day one as possible. By that point, most people are tapped out because the cognitive load is high. Then the team can go away and sleep on it. Once they’ve had time to reflect on it, they’ll come back with other ideas for user stories and thoughts about how they’d do the work before they start sequencing.”

Nicholas Muldoon, Co-Founder @Easy Agile

You don’t have to do your whole user story mapping session in one go. Depending on the size, complexity, and phase of your product, you might not be able to fit it into one day, either.

Instead, break your session up into 2-3 hour chunks and do it over several days. You might do the first session in the afternoon and the next session the following morning. This comes with a few advantages:

• It means you don’t have to get your stakeholders and teams together for an extended period
• You might find it’s a lot easier to coordinate your calendars when you split your sessions up
• It gives your team time to reflect on the initial story map (they’ll probably think of a million new things to add on day two)
• Your team can get lunch after the session is done and debrief over food and drinks 🍻🍔🍕

A single facilitator

While you DO want all your team and stakeholders at your user story mapping session, you don’t want everybody driving the discussion (too many chefs in the kitchen = not a good idea). Instead choose one person to facilitate the session. Sometimes it even works better if you can choose a product manager from another team to run things.

No phones/laptops

For in-person user story mapping sessions, only your designated facilitator is allowed their device. To avoid distractions, ask folks to leave their phones and laptops in a stack at the door. That way, your team can be fully present for all discussions.

Start with data and evidence

Before you get stuck into user story mapping, bring in relevant data and supporting evidence. All of that is great context for what's to come. And of course, you can’t do user story mapping without a clear understanding of who your users are - and what their goals, objectives, problems, and needs are.

So, create your personas before you build out your customer journeys. That way, you’ll understand how your users will engage with the product, and you’ll be able to write user stories that more accurately reflect reality.

User Story Mapping Approaches

User story mapping example

Let’s go through an example of user story mapping to help you visualize the process for your own product.

• Identify product/outcome

In this example, our product is a free online educational kids game. The outcome is for the user to find and play the game.

• List high level activities (in chronological order):
• Navigate to games website
• Log into account (or sign up if a first-time user)
• Search for game
• Choose game
• Play game
• Share with a friend or on social media
• List user stories under each activity

For example, searching for a game could include the following options:

• Free text search - As a parent, I want to search for a specific keyword so I can quickly navigate to a game
• Browse by category: age group - As a parent, I want to find an age appropriate game that my kids will easily pick up
• Browse by category: type of education - As a parent, I want to find a game that will help my child improve their knowledge and skills in a specific area
• Browse by category: game type - As a parent, I want to find a new game that’s similar to one my child already likes
• Order by top rated - As a parent, I want to find a game that’s likely to keep my kid engaged for a while so I can get some work done
• Order by newest/oldest - As a parent, I want to help my child find a game they haven’t already played, to give them a new experience
• Order by most popular - As a parent, I want to help my child find and play the most popular games
• Order stories from most to least valuable to users

Value is identified from analytics on usage patterns, customer interviews, and other insights.

Your team might check feedback forms to see what parents’ top requested features are, and prioritize these first. That way, they’ll deliver more value, more quickly.

Sequence the work so you know what to deliver and when

Your team will estimate the work involved in each user story and decide what stories you can complete for upcoming sprints or releases. They may group stories that are needed to deliver an MVP, or stories that need to get released together - for example, all the “browse by category” features might go live at the same time.

Split it up over releases or sprints

The team sets your cut lines (for the sprint or version), allowing them to distinguish what they think they can deliver in that sprint/version. This will be based on their capacity and what they need to deliver to users for a minimum viable product (MVP).

A user story mapping… story

During his time at Twitter, our Co-Founder, Nicholas Muldoon, facilitated a session for another team whose goal was to figure out how they should fix an issue with the app. This example (in Nick’s words) shows another interesting application of user story mapping, including the types of issues you might work through and how you can hone in on a particular persona or subsection of your audience.

Step 1: Kick off

We started by getting everyone in the room. Attendees included several subject matter experts - not just the immediate team who were working on the project. This included someone from the user authentication team and a UX designer who had worked on password resets in the past.

The product manager kicked off the session by explaining the situation: “A whole chunk of users are having trouble getting into the app because they can’t remember their password. But in order to get them to go through the tedious password reset process, we want to give them value first to show that it’s worth doing. How?”

Step 2: Persona identification

To figure out the next steps and do user story mapping, we needed to narrow down the audience so we could use it as a framing reference or persona. After all, we were looking at a huge audience of 30 million people, not a single persona.

So we asked: who are we not targeting? Then we were able to take out any pro users and government users, which brought the audience size down to 28 million.

Next we asked: what’s the easiest place to experiment and test this? At the time, there was a feature we couldn’t access on IOS, so we went with Android. Plus, we had great relationships with the US-based phone carrier, AT&T. So we looked at our audience of Android users on AT&T in the US, which left us with a much more reasonable audience size of 3 million people.

We used this persona to experiment with this particular feature without touching all the different use cases.

Step 3: The big steps

Once we’d outlined the persona we were going to focus on, we could talk about what’s in or what’s out. So, we talked about the big steps, like:

• They’re on the Android home screen
• They open up the app
• They see all the features
• They attempt an action (Tweet, like, or retweet)
• They perform a password reset
• These customer-facing epics form the backbone of the user story map.

Plus, in this session, we also included technical epics for stuff we needed from other teams at Twitter. For example, this team didn’t control all the authentication, so they added a technical epic to have a conversation with another team to get that piece on their backlog so they had everything they needed for the experiment.

Step 4: The stories

As we fleshed out the epics, we built out the user stories below each of them.

Step 5: Cut lines

Typically, your team would do estimation and cut lines at this point, but we didn’t need to because timing was less relevant. We had to include all the essential stories to successfully run the experiment.

We did our user story mapping physically on a whiteboard, so we used tape to separate what was in and out of sprint one, two, and three. We had the backlog on the right hand side, which consisted of anything we’d discussed that we couldn’t include this time, but we wanted to come back to later. Maybe some items weren’t applicable to this persona, or we’d come back to it for IOS.

In other scenarios, we’d order the stories based on what we understood would provide the most value, estimate with story points, and then plan the capacity for a week or fortnight of work, based on historical velocity. Then we’d sequence the stories into sprint and versions. Sequencing might involve moving up something of lower customer value because you can fit it in. You might also need to break down a bigger or riskier story and split it into two user stories.

Throughout the process, everyone had the opportunity to voice their opinions (there’s nothing more frustrating than not being heard or listened to) and we’d put it on the board. One of my roles as the facilitator was to manage everyone in the room - from the quietest person to the most outgoing person.

If someone was being quiet, I’d pull them into the discussion and ask them for their thoughts directly. It’s important to pull in from different participants to get a holistic vision or understanding. Because at the end of the day, the purpose of user story mapping is to get the team on the same page. If the team sets off and they haven’t bought into the vision, they’ll soon find that everyone has a different understanding of what’s meant to happen. It’s less about the process, and much more about the alignment of the team.

Results 🏆

As a result of this user story mapping process, the project took a new direction where the app would use the device identifier along with the username to figure out who the user was before they log in. This would allow them to get straight into the timeline so they can get value.

But if they wanted to complete any actions (like Tweet, RT, or like a Tweet), they’d need to put in a password (and would hopefully be engaged enough to complete the process). Overall, it was a very successful user story mapping session!

Physical vs digital user story mapping

So, now that you know the steps in user story mapping, how do you actually implement them?

Traditionally, user story mapping is done physically. You get your team in a room, write out the backbone and user stories on post-it notes, arrange them on a wall, and use a string to represent the cut lines or swimlanes.

It might look a bit like this:

But this process does come with some challenges:

• You’ll have to find and book a room for a day (or longer if you need to map a complex product and user journey)
• We all know that post-it notes have a tendency to lose their stickiness and fall off the wall (even if you totally nail your peeling technique)
• Even if you involve remote team members using video conferencing, it’s tricky for them to read post-its - and of course, much harder for them to contribute
• A team member will still need to enter all the data into Jira once your user story mapping session is done (it’ll look like the below screenshot, which doesn’t resemble your physical story map too much)

“When I worked at Twitter, they tried to do physical user story mapping over video conferencing to include distributed team members. It was challenging. There’d be a lot of ‘Hey Nick, what does this say?’ and I’d need to read it out or type it out on chat.”

Nicholas Muldoon, Co-Founder @Easy Agile

That’s why it’s often better to use a tool or app to do your user story mapping digitally.

While there are a couple of user story mapping apps and software options, the most efficient approach is to use a user mapping tool that integrates directly with Jira.

That way, you don’t have to transfer your work into Jira - your team can move straight into working on their top priority stories as soon as you wrap up your mapping session.

Read ➡️ User Story Mapping for Remote Teams

Jira + Easy Agile TeamRhythm

Jira on its own doesn’t allow you to do user story mapping. It doesn’t replicate the physical session with sticky notes and an X axis. The best it can do is a flat backlog - and hopefully by now, you know that’s not good enough for most teams.

Fortunately, you can run a digital and collaborative story mapping session right inside Jira with Easy Agile TeamRhythm, which is an add-on for Jira.

Here’s how it works:

Add user story mapping capabilities to Jira

Add Easy Agile TeamRhythm to your Jira account. You can get started with a free 30-day trial.

If you open TeamRhythm from an agile board that’s already in use, it’ll automatically get populated with your board’s data, with current issues added to the backlog panel in the right hand panel. But don’t worry - you can easily edit this data. And if it’s a new agile board, you can easily add your backbone, stories, and swimlanes from scratch.

Set up your backbone

Across the top of the board you’ll create a horizontal row of epics (if you already have epics associated with your board, this will be pre-populated). Each epic represents an activity of the users flow through the product. This is often referred to as the 'backbone' of the story map.

These epics can be dragged and dropped and the order of the epics will be reflected on the backlog using Jira ranking.

Creating new epics right inside the story map is simple with Easy Agile. Simply click the “Create Epic” button in the top right of the screen. Add the name and description, then click “Create”. Scroll to the far right of your story map to find your new epic.

Don’t worry about getting everything perfect right away. You have the ability to edit them in-line later.

Add the flesh (or stories!)

Beneath each epic on the backbone, you’ll see any linked User Stories that are ordered by rank. To add a new story, hover over the space where you want to create your story and click “new”. Enter the name of your story and select your issue type from the drop-down (e.g. task, story, or bug). You can also access the Backlog panel to add existing stories or issues - simply click “existing”, search for your issue, and add it.

You can also drag issues in from the backlog panel.

And just like epics, you can edit your stories in-line by clicking on the name of the issue.

Order your epics and stories

Now, put your epics and stories in order. Your epics should reflect your customer’s journey from beginning to end. And your stories should be ordered by the value they deliver to customers.

In Easy Agile apps, you can click and drag to rearrange your stories and epics. And if you move an epic, the associated stories underneath will move with it.

Estimate work

Hover over the estimate field (the gray number on the bottom of each story item). Click to add or edit story points.

Read ➡️ Agile Estimation Techniques

Add and arrange swimlanes (version/sprint)

Now it’s time to decide what issues your team will tackle when by horizontally slicing up the work. Click on the swimlanes button in the top right. You can choose to sequence work by sprints or versions (depending on whether you’re Scrum or Kanban*). Your sprints or versions will appear in chronological order on the story map, and there’s an “add sprint” button at the bottom of the story map where your team can add additional sprints and versions.

* With Kanban, you’d typically sequence work into versions, as there is no sprint. This can help your team whittle down the long list of stories into the 'now' and 'future' buckets.

You can easily drag and drop stories, mapping them to the appropriate swimlane.

Check team velocity to avoid over committing your team during each sprint or version. Hover over the “Not started”, “In progress”, and “Done” indicators on the far right of the sprint or version swimlane to see how your story points are tracking across all the stories and issues. If you have too many story points, you can move some stories to the next sprint or version.

Read ➡️ Agile Story Points: Measure Effort Like a Pro

Try out different views

You can search or create a Quick Filter based on a text search (e.g. contains "As a parent"). Or if you’re using our other product, Easy Agile Personas, we have a tutorial on how you can create a Quick Filter by persona. That way, you can refine your story map and narrow in on what’s really important to you.

Get to work!

All changes made inside the story mapping session are automatically reflected in Jira, so your team can leave the story mapping session ready to start their work.

Get started with Easy Agile TeamRhythm

Easy Agile TeamRhythm works out of the box with your existing backlog (so getting started is super quick and simple). But it gives you that extra dimension to help bring your backlog to life. It’s aliiiiive!

Want to check it out for yourself? We have two options:

Easy Agile TeamRhythm Free Trial

OR play around with our demo (no installation or sign-up needed) :-)

TeamRhythm Highlights Tour

But don’t just listen to us. Here’s what some of our customers have to say:

Jira software is great for following activities and backlogs, but it’s easy to lose the vision of your product without user story mapping. Easy Agile User Story Mapping allows the teams to communicate - not only about activity but also the vision of the product. Some of our teams regularly refer to this tool for retrospectives, and it helps them make the product their product.

- Paul Flye Sainte Marie, Agile and Tools Referent @Kering

We’ve found that Easy Agile User Story Maps brings the team together in one room. As a result, we find ourselves mapping more as a group, which creates a common understanding. Since using the add-on, we’ve been able to speed up planning and more efficiently conduct large story mapping exercises.

- Mike Doolittle, Product Director @Priceline

Since using Easy Agile User Story Maps, we’ve improved our communication and team alignment, which has helped give us faster results.

- Casey Flynn, Distribution Forecast Analyst @adidas

Easy Agile User Story Maps has helped us visualize our workload and goals, as well as speed up our meetings. We love the simplicity!

- Rafal Zydek, Atlassian Jira and Confluence Expert Administrator @ING Tech Poland

See what all the fuss is about

Start your free 30 day trial

Easy Agile TeamRhythm

Psst: It’s the fastest growing and highest-rated story mapping app for Jira! You’re going to love it.

6 ways to keep your story map alive

Speaking of bringing things to life, we’ve got a few final tips...

Your user story map is designed to be a living, breathing thing so that it can help your team continuously deliver value to your customers. But you’ll miss out on these benefits if your team doesn't continually use it, reflect on it, and refine it.

Here are 6 ways you can keep your backlog alive:

1. Progress tracking

As your team delivers releases, they can visually track their progress against the user story map. With Easy Agile User Story Maps, updates in Jira are reflected directly in the user story map so you can check what percentage of work has been completed. This enables you to identify problems early on and adjust your team’s workload (and future versions/sprints) if needed.

2. Backlog grooming

The purpose of backlog grooming is to maintain a healthy, up-to-date product backlog, ready for efficient sprint planning. A few days before your sprint planning meeting, your product manager will:

• Delete user stories that aren’t relevant anymore
• Create new user stories as needs become clearer
• Assign and correct estimates
• Split user stories that are too big
• Rewrite stories to make them clearer
• Ensure stories are ordered by priority
• Make sure stories at the top are ready to be delivered

It’s much easier to do this using Easy Agile User Story Maps (rather than a flat backlog) because your product manager and team can see all the contextual information. They can shuffle the order around by clicking and dragging, and can quickly update issues with in-line editing.

3. Sprint/release planning

Sprint planning is done at the beginning of every sprint. It’s designed to help your team agree on a goal for the next sprint and the set of backlog items that will help them achieve it. This involves prioritizing backlog items (this should be straightforward, thanks to backlog grooming) and agreeing on what items your team has capacity for during the sprint. Sprint planning sessions tend to run a lot more smoothly when you refer to your user story map. With Easy Agile User Story Maps, you can update your story map with backlog items as you go, and all your changes are reflected in Jira so your team can start work on the sprint straight away.

4. Sprint reviews

At the end of each sprint, your team will do a sprint review to see whether the goal was achieved and that your increment led to a working, shippable product release. Your product manager will look at the “Done” items from the backlog, and the development team will demonstrate the work they’ve done.

The team talks about what went well, any problems, and how they were solved or could be solved. They review the timeline, budget, and potential capabilities for the next planned product release, which puts the gears into motion for the next backlog grooming and sprint planning session.

In Easy Agile User Story Maps, you can easily filter your view to show “done” issues, see sprint statistics, and update story point estimates. That way, you can do a quick and collaborative sprint review meeting, right inside Jira.

5. Roadmaps

You can use your story map to communicate your roadmap with stakeholders and share the product vision. With your upcoming releases and sprints mapped out, it’s easy to see which parts of the customer journey are going to see an update or improvement, and when.

6. Retrospectives

Retrospectives are often held at the end of your sprint or release. Or you might hold them after an event, presentation, every month, or every quarter. Retros are used to help your team reflect on what’s gone well, what could have gone better, and what they’d do differently next time. Your user story map can give your team a visual point of reference during retrospectives, and help them stay focused on the user.

How to learn more about user story mapping

We’re almost at the end, but don’t stop here! There’s so much more to learn if you want to go deeper with user story mapping.

Here are some resources worth looking into:

User story mapping books

Jeff Patton wrote THE book on user story mapping, called User Story Mapping: Discover the Whole Story, Build the Right Product. Jeff was the original user story mapper - at least, he’s credited with inventing the concept and practice.

User story mapping articles

Here are some articles written by us over the last few years:

Story maps - A visual tool for customer focused development (this one has a great video)

How to write good user stories in agile software development

The difference between a flat product backlog and a user story map

Anatomy of an agile user story map

That’s it! You’ve finished the user story mapping ultimate guide! 👏

You have all the tools and info you need to…

• Run your first user story mapping session
• Do story mapping more effectively (and confidently)
• Get more from your story map
• Prioritize your work to deliver maximum value to customers, as quickly and as often as possible
• Work more collaboratively
• Accurately schedule your work
• Understand the why behind the work

Go forth and story map! And let us know how you go.

If you have any questions about user story maps, we’d love to hear from you. You can contact us or send us a tweet @EasyAgile. We’ll update this guide as we come across more user story mapping tips, techniques, and frequently asked questions.

Just as you looking at a physical map before a road trip helps you understand the legs of each journey, roadmaps help agile teams understand their workloads for the upcoming months. Jira roadmaps offer further benefits, such as timeline visualization and the ability to share relevant information with external stakeholders.

In this article, we'll unpack the purpose of product roadmaps and whether they’re all the same, as well as why Easy Agile Roadmaps for Jira is the simplest roadmapping tool for Jira. You’ll discover how roadmaps help Product Owners, agile team members, customers, and stakeholders. You'll also understand the difference between roadmaps and Gantt charts.

Let’s start with discussing the purpose of roadmaps for agile teams.

Why does an agile team need a roadmap?

Roadmaps help agile teams define their big chunks of work and when to complete them by. It’s an artifact to communicate with the team, customers, and other project stakeholders.

With roadmaps, agile team members have a sense of their journey for the next 3-6 or even 12 months. By understanding this journey, teams can better understand their product’s evolution.

If you’re a Product Owner, roadmaps are a great way for you to:

• Demonstrate that you understand company goals
• Show the C suite and the agile team that you're aware of customer needs
• Show you know how to deliver a valuable product to your customers while meeting your company's goals

Roadmaps are also a great way to remind you and your team how their work fits into the bigger picture. They give you an opportunity to motivate and help team members.

Also, by breaking down epics into user stories in the product backlog, Product Owners and the development team can better prioritize, schedule, and assign resources to those work items.

Now that we've covered the basics of Jira roadmaps, let's take a look at how to adapt them for different roles.

Tailoring roadmaps to meet specific needs

Different people on the team will need different views of roadmaps. Some roles focus on analyzing specific roadmap items of roadmaps, and other roles focus on different parts.

The development team needs roadmaps with expected release dates, milestones, and a detailed customer value explanation.

You may prioritize roadmap items by customer value, which makes sense when considering the customer-first agile methodology.

Often, development teams have roadmaps organized by sprints and work items arranged on a timeline. A work item can be a user story, a task, or a bug.

The C suite uses roadmaps to map the work of development teams onto company goals and metrics.

Those roadmaps display work items organized by month or quarter. This organization helps track progress over time and draw conclusions on goal achievement.

When roadmapping for the C suite, you don't need to worry about providing them with detailed work item descriptions.

The sales staff relies on roadmaps to learn about new features and customer value. That kind of information can help improve sales conversion. Roadmaps are a great way for the sales staff to understand upcoming developments they can get customers excited about.

You should also do your best to offer visually appealing and highly readable roadmaps to your customers. They'll look for a prioritized overview of new features.

Jira roadmaps might help you deliver these different types of roadmaps.

Jira roadmaps

Atlassian included roadmaps in next-gen Jira software. Jira roadmaps allow you to define and organize items in a timeline and keep them up-to-date. You can even share the work status with stakeholders.

But the coolest thing about roadmaps in Jira is that it syncs with the developers' work.

As the scope of a project can change while agile teams are working, it can get tricky to maintain an up-to-date roadmap, especially if you’ve been using a static tool like Excel or Confluence. Thankfully, Jira roadmaps allow you to quickly and easily update the work status and item priorities.

Agile teams can attach user stories to the Jira project on which they're working. As a result, Jira software updates the actual work in their roadmap.

You can also use Jira software to break down roadmap items, or epics, which means dividing work into small chunks. And as if this wasn't enough fun, you can use Jira Software's drag-and-drop functionality to adjust item priorities in the timeline. Consequently, Jira Software automatically adjusts the dates in the epics.

These are a few more reasons why Jira roadmaps are worth checking out. They offer:

• Stakeholder collaboration in creating and maintaining the roadmap
• The ability to share information with external stakeholders
• Increased availability and visibility to team members
• Tight links between a team's work and the roadmap
• Seamless item update ability
• Project status visualization
• Both high-level and detailed item descriptions
• Connections between Jira issue dates and dates on the roadmap

Easy Agile Roadmaps for Jira can help shape your roadmap as a timeline with swimlanes based on work themes or teams. Drag and drop items on the timeline to set when the team will begin and end working on them. You can also:

• Define milestones
• Filter the roadmap’s view
• Track epic completion progress
• Share a PDF version of the roadmap with stakeholders

Before you go, we should get on the same page about Gantt charts vs. roadmaps.

What are Gantt charts?

When we say “Gantt charts are useful for agile teams,” you might immediately think, “That can’t be right!” 😮 However, Gantt charts can be useful in the right context. They’re just not very agile.

The Gantt chart, named for the chart’s creator, Henry Lawrence Gantt, provides a graphic schedule for planning and visualizing tasks organized by project stages.

Project managers use Gantt charts to manage task dependencies and the critical path. This path is the sequence of tasks that team members must execute on time to not compromise the project’s end date.

Simply put, if you’re building a data center, you have to define the order in which the team must execute tasks. Basically, the team can’t start some tasks before completing others.

Now, let’s clarify why roadmaps are agile, whereas Gantt charts are not.

Why Gantt charts and roadmaps are not interchangeable

At first glance, Gantt charts seem similar to roadmaps. However, at their core, they serve different purposes and audiences.

Gantt charts assume that team members will complete work in a linear fashion. This means that the execution of some tasks depends on the execution of other tasks. And any modification to the schedule can compromise the project’s end date, so you should avoid task rescheduling and frequently track the execution of tasks.

This is why the linearity of Gantt charts goes against the very principles of agile. 🛑

The agile methodology originated from the need to address the inefficiencies of traditional project management practices in software development. One of those methodologies is the waterfall methodology.

Agile teams do adaptive planning and deliver outcomes on an ongoing basis. They also focus on continuous improvement. That’s why no Gantt chart would fit into an agile workflow.

Gantt charts follow a linear delivery model with lots of task dependencies, which tends to be slow. 🐌

On the other hand, the agile workflow has shorter development cycles — iterations — with frequent deliveries and the bare minimum task dependencies. That speeds up continuous improvement. Additionally, agile teams adapt their roadmaps very well to ever-changing priorities and requirements.

Roadmaps are good, but Jira roadmaps are awesome

Jira roadmaps like Easy Agile Roadmaps help order work items by priority and update their statuses. Stakeholders can make collaborative edits on roadmaps in Jira, which is very convenient.

Perhaps the greatest feature of Jira roadmaps is that developers can both track work in Jira Software user stories and through the tasks on those roadmaps. From the Product Owner's perspective, the benefit is how they visualize the developers' work and communicate it with stakeholders.

It’s really important to make sure that both the C suite and the agile team buy into the roadmap. If they don’t, you might not be aligning your team’s work with company goals and customer needs.

Keep in mind that roadmaps’ benefits work two ways: Team members better realize how they contribute to achieving company goals, and you can monitor that process.

Try our Easy Agile Roadmaps for Jira. Whether you’re following the Scrum framework or the Kanban framework, it’ll help you organize your team’s work items in a timeline, define milestones, and track progress.

How do you feel when someone mentions “planning”? Do you look forward to the opportunity or does the thought of making a plan send you running for the hills?

Sprint planning is a crucial part of the agile sprint cycle. It helps you and your team align around common goals, and sets you up for a successful sprint. Even if planning isn’t one of your strengths, the good news is that you can practice and get better over time with the help of some good advice.

We’ve combined our best sprint planning tips into an ultimate guide to agile sprint planning, with everything you need to run efficient and effective planning meetings.

What is agile sprint planning?

Agile sprint planning is a key ceremony in the agile sprint cycle. It signifies and prepares the team for the start of the sprint. Without this planning, there is a very real risk that the team would lack focus and fail to align on what is most important.

Effective agile sprint planning has three key parts; a sprint goal, an understanding of team capacity, and a prioritized set of backlog items. Each element depends on the other for success.

The idea is to align your team around a goal for the next sprint by agreeing on a set of backlog items that are achievable within the sprint and contribute to reaching the sprint goal. Gaining focus and clarity on what you plan to achieve will help your team to work better together and to deliver on objectives.

It is best to start with an agreed sprint goal. You can then prioritize work on the specific set of backlog items that your team has the capacity to complete, and that will contribute to making your sprint goal a reality.

How sprint planning fits within the Scrum process

We’re big fans of the Scrum process, and it’s hugely popular with many software development teams. While agile sprint planning can take many forms within the different agile methodologies, for the purposes of this guide, we’ll focus on agile sprint planning within the Scrum framework.

If your team doesn’t follow Scrum don’t worry — you’ll still find value in our preparation tips, meeting guide, mistakes to avoid, and sprint planning resources.

💡 Learn more: What's the Difference Between Kanban vs. Scrum?

Scrum roles: The people

There are three main roles within a Scrum team.

1. Product Owner
2. Scrum Master
3. Development team

The Product Owner puts in the work upfront. They help prioritize the product backlog items and decide which should move to the sprint backlog. These important decisions guide the goals of the sprint and determine the tasks the team will tackle over the next sprint.

The Scrum Master acts as a guide, they lead meetings that help ensure that the Scrum framework is followed throughout the sprint to keep the team on track. The Scrum Master helps the team get the most out of the entire Scrum process and each individual Scrum ceremony.

The development team is made up of the various people who will complete the work agreed upon during sprint planning.

There are others that you might refer to during sprint planning, such as stakeholders, users, and customers. While these aren’t technically Scrum roles, they play a critical role in product development. Stakeholders should be brought into the process early and often, and customers should always be top-of-mind when making any development decisions. Some teams find User Personas to be a valuable way of keeping user value in focus.

Artifacts: What gets done

Artifacts are the things to get done — different breakdowns of what the team hopes to accomplish:

1. Product backlog
2. Sprint backlog
3. Increments

Product backlog items are the tasks the team believes they need to accomplish in order to complete a product or specific improvement of a product. It is the big master list of everything that the team thinks they need to accomplish. The product backlog is flexible and iterative, and it will evolve as the team learns more about the product, stakeholder feedback, and customer needs.

The sprint backlog is more focused than the product backlog. The product owner moves the most important backlog items from the product backlog to the sprint backlog at the beginning of each sprint based on current issues, priorities, and customer needs. The team aims to complete all of the sprint backlog items over the course of the sprint.

An increment is a concrete stepping stone toward reaching the Product Goal. An increment must be verified as usable in order to provide value, which means that any work completed cannot be considered part of an increment unless it meets the Definition of Done (an agreement among the team of what “done” means). This is a formal description of the state of the increment when it meets the quality standards required of a product. Once the work completed satisfies the agreed Definition of Done, you gain an increment.

Scrum ceremonies: Where Sprint Planning fits

There are a number of ceremonies in Scrum that occur each sprint. This is where sprint planning fits within the Scrum process.

1. Sprint planning
2. Daily scrum (or standup)
3. Sprint review
4. Sprint retrospective

💡 Learn more: Agile Ceremonies: Your Guide to the Four Stages

Sprint planning is the first Scrum ceremony — it prepares the team for the sprint. The planning session sets everything into motion, aligning the team on what’s most important for this sprint. This is when decisions are made and key backlog items are moved from the product backlog to the sprint backlog.

The second ceremony repeats every day of the sprint. Daily standups bring the team together to discuss progress and blockers that might be getting in the way. By getting the concerns out in the open early, the team can avoid the frustration of delays and ensure work continues to flow.

The final two ceremonies happen at the end of the sprint. For the sprint review, the team comes together to determine the success of the sprint based on the “Done” work completed. It’s also a chance to bring in stakeholders to gather feedback on what's been accomplished so far. The sprint review ensures customer insights are always top-of-mind, stakeholders continually see progress, and guarantees the product never strays too far from what the stakeholders are looking for.

The sprint retrospective gathers critical insights from team members about how the sprint went. What went well, what didn’t go so well, and what could be improved upon for next time? These valuable insights are what makes Scrum agile — the team is always thinking critically about the process and looking for ways to improve the work and how they work together.

We’ll talk about these ceremonies in more detail below when we discuss what happens after the sprint planning meeting.

The benefits of agile sprint planning

Agile sprint planning is a powerful meeting that should not be overlooked or underestimated. It is an opportunity to:

• Bring the whole team together and align around common goals
• Set context by starting the sprint with clear priorities
• Identify potential roadblocks before they occur
• Bring stakeholder feedback into the planning process
• Learn from previous sprints by considering sprint review and retrospective insights
• Consider team capacity and adjust accordingly to ensure that goals are achievable and that the team isn’t overcommitted in the upcoming sprint
• Account and plan for dependencies that may impact the flow of work.

How to prepare for a sprint planning meeting

We know we said that a sprint begins with sprint planning, but there are actually a few important steps you must take in order to prepare for the planning session. Unfortunately, you do need to do a little planning for the planning meeting.

Backlog refinement

Backlog grooming or refinement keeps your backlog healthy, up-to-date, and ready for sprint planning. A refined backlog will help ensure your team’s planning time is used efficiently and effectively since you won't have to waste time adding details to the backlog that could have been completed in advance before everyone came together.

The product manager should groom the backlog a few days before the sprint planning meeting to make sure it’s ready.

Tips for maintaining a healthy backlog:

• Ensure stories are in order of priority
• Prioritize items that bring the customer the most value
• Add detail to the highest-priority backlog items
• Split any user stories that are too big
• Delete any user stories that aren’t relevant anymore
• Create new user stories based on new or clearer needs
• Add items based on new stakeholder feedback
• Make adjustments based on bug fixes
• Assign more accurate estimates

💡 Learn more: Essential Checklist for Effective Backlog Refinement (and What To Avoid)

Be consistent

A consistent meeting time that’s scheduled well in advance will ensure that the entire Scrum team keeps the time slot open. Book your sprint planning meeting on the same day and at the same time every sprint so that no one forgets or double books.

Sprint planning is not a meeting to be shuffled around, delayed, or ignored — sprint planning meetings are essential to the success of every sprint. Ask your team about a specific, recurring time to meet, and ensure it works for everyone.

How to run a sprint planning meeting

While the agile method is flexible and collaborative, it isn’t chaotic; everything needs to begin with a plan.

1. Stick to a set sprint planning meeting duration

As with any kind of meeting, the team can be easily sidetracked without a timebox. After all, talking about the work that needs to be completed is often easier than actually completing it. It’s the Scrum Master’s job to keep the team on track and make sure the time limit isn’t exceeded.

Go into the sprint planning meeting well-prepared; a clear agenda and a well-refined backlog mean your team can get straight to planning.

Set a realistic timebox for the meeting and stick to it. We recommend that you avoid scheduling more than 2-3 hours for a sprint planning meeting, but as you become more skilled in sprint planning, you’ll better understand the length of time that works for you and your team.

2. Use estimates to make realistic decisions

You want your team to be as productive as possible, but overloading them can actually hinder productivity and focus. Unreasonable expectations are demotivating and overcommitted team members are more likely to make mistakes.

You need to understand the effort and time it will take to complete the goals you set out to accomplish for each sprint. Agile estimation techniques and story points provide a better understanding of team capacity, individual capacity, and what a reasonable workload looks like. Reasonable and realistic goals will help your team stay motivated and support a consistent flow of work.

3. Define clear goals and outcomes

What does the team aim to accomplish between now and the end of the sprint? Set clearly defined goals and outcomes that everyone understands. Do your goals align with what you learned from past sprints? Do they align with customer needs? Does everyone agree on what the next sprint will (roughly) look like?

Don’t assume that everyone is on the same page. Ask questions and encourage your team to speak up if anything is unclear. It’s better to clear up discrepancies or misunderstandings now rather than once the work begins.

Setting sprint goals effectively involves following the SMART framework, a well-regarded strategy in project management and goal-setting across various industries. The acronym SMART stands for:

• Specific: Clearly define what you aim to achieve. Avoid vague goals by pinpointing precise outcomes.
• Measurable: Establish criteria for measuring progress. This helps in tracking accomplishments and identifying areas that need adjustment.
• Achievable: Aim for goals that are challenging yet attainable with the resources at hand. Overambitious targets can demoralize a team if not realistic.
• Relevant: Ensure that each goal aligns with the broader objectives of the project. Irrelevant tasks can divert energy from what's truly important.
• Time-bound: Set a clear deadline to maintain urgency and focus. Sprint goals must coincide with the sprint’s limited timeline to ensure timely completion.

In practice, applying the SMART framework to sprint goals means your team is synchronized and focused on priorities that drive the project forward efficiently. By keeping goals relevant and achievable within the sprint's timeframe, you avoid misallocation of efforts and ensure progress is aligned with overall project ambitions.

Post your sprint goal somewhere that is easily accessible so that the team can refer back to it throughout the sprint.

💡 Learn more: How to Make the Most of Your Sprint Goals

4. Decide what it means to be ‘done’

What does “done” mean for any given backlog item, increment, product issue, or product as a whole? The team and your stakeholders need to agree on what done looks like in order to set realistic goals that meet the expectations of everyone involved.

As you set goals and choose which backlog items to complete for the next sprint, be clear about what it means to meet and complete the goals you want to accomplish.

5. Align sprint goals with product goals

Sprint goals should always align with your broader product goals. Your sprint may take a specific direction depending on current product issues, bug fixes, or customer concerns, but it’s important to keep an eye on the big picture.

Choose backlog items with care — make sure they relate to the larger product goal and that each works in sync to move development forward. Overlooking product goals in sprint planning could mean that each sprint looks more like a random selection of to-do lists that don’t connect back to customer needs, relate to product goals, or help you reach important increments. The result will feel like a lack of progress, which risks disengaging the team and other important stakeholders, like your users.

What happens next?

Now that the planning is done, you’re ready to implement your plan and complete the work. But that doesn’t mean that team members go off and work in isolation.

Daily scrum (or stand-up)

The daily scrum or stand-up is an opportunity for a collaborative agile team to maintain progress. It should be a quick check-in at the start of each day.

The team will discuss what has been done in the past 24 hours, any roadblocks they might have hit, and what the team hopes to accomplish the next day.

This critical check-in helps the team stay on the same page, helps to ensure the continued flow of work, and keeps the team on track to achieve sprint goals.

Sprint review

A sprint review meeting takes place at the end of a sprint. It's a chance for the team to review all of the “Done” issues for that period. The sprint review determines whether or not the goal for the sprint was achieved.

It’s a chance to demonstrate shippable working product increments to the team, and also an opportunity to bring in stakeholder feedback. This feedback gives you valuable insights to assess if you’re on the right track, or need to make changes in the next sprint. The sprint review is also excellent preparation for the next backlog grooming and sprint planning session.

💡 Learn more: Introduction to Sprint Reviews

Sprint retrospective

While the sprint review looks at what was accomplished and how to move forward, the retrospective examines your processes and how the team is working together.

What did you learn during the previous sprint? While retrospectives can take many forms, the goal is to discover what worked well, what didn't go so well, and what could be improved upon next time. Your team will use the insights gathered in the retrospective to improve how you work together and deliver value to customers in the future.

💡 Learn more: 5 Steps to Holding Effective Sprint Retrospectives

Agile sprint planning mistakes

It’s easy to fall into bad habits, especially as deadlines and product launch dates approach. Avoid these common agile planning mistakes to ensure your team is always making the most of the agile methodology and the Scrum process.

Unrealistic expectations

Choosing unattainable goals sets your whole team up for failure. Failing to meet your sprint goals sprint after sprint is damaging for team motivation and morale.

Use estimates to set reasonable goals as best you can. Consider team capacity, factoring in your past knowledge of how long tasks take to complete, how the team works, and potential roadblocks that could arise along the way.

Lack of context

Your team will benefit from an understanding of how the issues they’re working on fit into the bigger picture.

Depending on the tool you’re using to plan and manage your work, it can be difficult to see the contextual detail needed to plan and work with clarity. The more items you have, the more difficult and overwhelming it will be to organize and prioritize. Use tools that allow you to add context, depth, and customer insights with clean functionality to adapt your plan to the needs of your team and stakeholders.

Neglecting your backlog

We mentioned this point when we talked about what you need to do to prepare for sprint planning. It’s worth mentioning again because it’s a common mistake.

When you go into a sprint planning meeting without a well-managed backlog, you lack the clarity you need to plan effectively. Your time is valuable, and so is the time of your team, so it should be treated with care and used effectively.

A well-managed backlog is DEEP:

• Detailed appropriately
• Estimated
• Emergent
• Prioritized

💡 Learn more: The 4 Characteristics of a Good Product Backlog

Not allowing the plan to adapt

When you plan your sprint, you’ll do everything you can to prioritize the most important tasks for the length of the sprint. It’s important to try to stick to the plan as best you can, but you also need to adapt as you acquire new information.

Be ready to make changes on the fly should you hit roadblocks or acquire new information about customer needs, concerns, or product issues.

Failing to understand stakeholders

You need to understand the goals and priorities of stakeholders to be successful. Just because you’re happy with what you’ve accomplished doesn't mean your stakeholders will too.

Ensure your stakeholders are brought into your process early and often and help them understand how you work to provide them value. Gather feedback from stakeholders regularly to ensure your goals are aligned. A good time for this is during the sprint review. Just make sure those insights are transferred over to your next planning meeting.

Not choosing tools with a customer-centric approach

Successful product development delivers what the customer needs and wants. To build for your customers, it helps to use tools for planning and work management that makes it easy to keep them top-of-mind. Incorporating user story maps and customer personas into your planning helps you and your team prioritize the work that will deliver the most value first.

💡 Learn more: 10 tips for more effective user personas

Failing to incorporate retrospective insights into planning

Retrospectives are the best thing you can do to help your team work better together. During a retrospective, you're asking your team to be open and honest about how things went over the course of the sprint so that you can learn from each other.

Failing to learn from those insights means that the collective time spent in the retrospective has been wasted, and the feedback that your team has shared is devalued.

Incorporating the learnings you gain from a retrospective into your next planning session and into the next sprint, will support your team to improve every time, helping them gain work satisfaction and deliver better outcomes.

Virtual vs. in-person sprint planning

The advantages of remote work also bring challenges for collaborative planning. No matter the way your team chooses to meet, whether virtually, in person, or a combination of both, it’s important that you choose tools that meet the needs of your team.

Tips for virtual sprint planning:

• Be really prepared - communicate plans clearly ahead of time, so that everyone has clear expectations.
• Use a video conferencing tool that allows for breakout sessions
• Set up the interactive online resources you plan to use and include links in the meeting request.
• Online discussions don’t start as naturally as they would in person, so share discussion topics ahead of time, and consider preparing some ice-breakers.
• Ensure that you’ve accounted for time differences for teams that span time zones.
• Tech issues arise no matter how much advanced planning and testing you do. Always expect the unexpected.

Tips for in-person sprint planning:

• Book a meeting room with plenty of space for your team, and consider separate spaces for breakout sessions.
• Ensure that your meeting room will accommodate a shared view of your sprint plan - do you need a wall for sticky notes, or a screen to share a digital tool?
• If some of your team members work remotely, it’s difficult to involve them in the same way, so consider how this might work for your team. They won’t be able to read a whiteboard or sticky notes as easily, so a digital solution may be best.
• If you choose to plan your sprint ‘on the wall’, be sure to nominate someone to transcribe your plan into your work management tool at the end of the planning meeting.

No matter where your planning takes place, always remember to prepare your backlog ahead of time so that you can have focused and informed discussions during sprint planning.

Additional agile resources

We’re continually adding to our content library, which is filled with resources, how-to guides, product updates, and more.

📚 Add these to your list:

• Easy Agile Podcast Ep.20: The importance of the Team Retrospective
• Easy Agile Podcast Ep.18 Top qualities of an agile leader and team
• Easy Agile Podcast Ep.16 Enabling high performing agile teams with Adaptavist
• Being agile vs doing agile
• The Ultimate Guide to User Story Mapping
• The Ultimate Guide to Buyer Personas
• The Ultimate Guide to PI Planning [2022 SAFe Edition]

Using Easy Agile to improve sprint planning

Make your sprint planning smooth and effective with Easy Agile TeamRhythm. Transform your flat product backlog into a dynamic, flexible, and visual representation of the work to be done. Seamlessly integrated with Jira, with TeamRhythm you can:

• View your Jira stories, tasks, and bugs in context, aligned beneath their epics on the story map
• Drag and drop Jira issues from the backlog into a sprint
• Create new issues right on the story map
• Estimate issues on the story map, and gauge capacity with story point totals in each sprint swimlane
• Publish the sprint goal on each sprint swimlane, so it’s always top of mind
• Use filters to focus on the stories and issues that are most important now
• Group epics by a third level of hierarchy, to easily see how the work in focus contributes to the bigger picture

Easy Agile TeamRhythm also supports team retrospectives, with flexible and intuitive retrospectives boards created for every sprint. You can add retrospective items right from the sprint swimlane, so you don’t forget any important points. And you can turn retrospective action items into Jira issues that can be scheduled for future sprints, so you’re always getting better at what you do, and delivering for your customers.

Thanks for reading our ultimate agile sprint planning guide! If you have any questions about this guide, our other content, or our products, reach out to our team at any time. We love hearing from you.

We’ll continue to update this guide as we gain more agile planning insights, techniques, tools, and best practices.