The Difference Between a Flat Product Backlog and a User Story Map
It’s one of the most common practices in agile software development; the flat product backlog. We’ve all seen them, we’ve all contributed to them, and we’ve all inevitably drowned in them.
In its simplest form, a flat product backlog is a laundry list of ‘stuff to do’ that will ultimately provide value to the customer. These actionable items are prioritised (top to bottom) in the order the value will be delivered. If a team is adopting the Scrum method the backlog is split into future sprints to provide an indication of what will be delivered and when.
Depending on the size and requirements of the organisation, the list of things to be done could be 10, 100 or 1,000 actionable items. It’s easy to see how managing the latter comes with the challenges of updating, assigning, grooming and scheduling these items.
What’s Wrong With Flat User Story Backlogs?
So far we know that flat backlogs represent a list of things to be done. This comes with its challenges, and its shortcomings were best described by Jeff Patton when he said;
We spend lots of time working with our customers. We work hard to understand their goals, their users, and the major parts of the system we could build. Then we finally get down to the details — the pieces of functionality we’d like to build. In my head I see a tree where the trunk is built from the goals or desired benefits that drive the system; big branches are users; the small branches and twigs are the capabilities they need; then finally the leaves are the user stories small enough to place into development iterations.
After all that work, after establishing all that shared understanding, I feel like we pull all the leaves off the tree and load them into a leaf bag — then cut down the tree.
That’s what a flat backlog is to me. A bag of context-free mulch
How do you pick an item from a list, and deem it the thing that’s going to provide the most value to your customers, without that additional context?
Shortcomings of a Flat Product Backlog
- The flat backlog makes it impossible to discover the ‘backbone’ of your product — the customers interaction experience with the product
- Arranging user stories in the order they’ll be delivered doesn’t help a product manager explain to others what the system does
- The flat backlog provides no context or ‘big picture’ around the work a team is doing
- A flat backlog makes it hard for the product manager to determine if they’ve identified the relevant user stories
- Release planning is difficult with a flat backlog. How do you prioritise what to build first in an endless laundry list?
User Story Maps
A story map is a visual representation of the journey a customer takes with a product, including the activities and tasks they complete. This visualisation helps the team to focus development on providing the most value to customers and their desired outcomes.
It provides context for teams by answering the following questions:
- Why are we building this?
- Who are we building this for?
- What value will the solution provide for the customer and when?
The story map still showcases the ‘stuff to be done’, the difference here though, is the way in which this information is visualised. As you can see, rather than listing these items out, each item is contextualised under a bigger piece of work. Besides the way the information is visualised, the key difference between a flat product backlog and a user story map, is the focus on the customer journey. Let’s unpack this by breaking down the anatomy of the user story map.
What A User Story Map Achieves that a Flat Product Backlog Can’t
- Focus on Desired Customer Outcomes: the visualisation of the customer journey allows teams to identify and implement features based on customer outcomes, and track progress at a glance against a story map
- Bring the Customer Journey to Life: the transformation of the flat product backlog to a customer centric story map means teams have a better understanding of their customer journey and what their customers want and value
- Prioritising Actions Based on Value to the Customer: visualisation of the customer journey allows teams to prioritise work based on “value to customer”, resulting in better outcomes and less waste
Are you getting lost in your flat product backlog? Are you stuck in an endless development cycle, but not really sure for who or why your building features?
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Easy Agile TeamRhythm supports User Story Mapping, sprint or version planning, backlog refinement, and team retrospectives.
Related Articles
WorkflowAnatomy of an Agile User Story Map
A user story map is a collaborative practice that guides an agile team in the creation of their product backlog.
The story map captures the journey a customer takes with the product including activities and tasks they undertake.
Creating the story map as a team ensures team members are on the same page from the start of development through to ongoing delivery of new releases.
In this post we’ll explore the aspects of a successful story map.
Backbone
A backbone provides structure. The backbone of the user story map captures the high level activities a user will accomplish while using the product.
If we take a simple example, buying and watching a movie on an Apple TV, we may have the following activities:
- select movie
- purchase movie
- watch movie
- review / recommend movie
For a user to watch a movie on the Apple TV they would have to complete three of these activities. And there may be other follow up activities such as writing a review or recommending the movie to a friend which we want to encourage.
Chronological Order
Once we’ve got the activities of the backbone identified we will order them in the chronological order of how a user will interact with the product. Following on with the Apple TV example we will make sure the order is correct:
It is common to rearrange existing activities or add new activities as the discussion unfolds. This is a key benefit of the collaborative approach to building the product backlog as we have the shared wisdom of an entire team involved in the discussion.
Stories
Below each activity on the backbone we create user stories which flesh out the customer journey. For example, below the ‘select movie’ activity we may see stories for:
- free text search
- browse by genre
- browse by recent addition
- browse by most popular
- browse by most popular by genre
- browse by recent addition by genre
These stories are ordered by value to the user. Value may be identified through conversations with users, analytics on usage patterns, or another form of insight appropriate for your product.
Sequence
Once the team has the backbone and stories ordered it is time to sequence the work. What do we want to deliver in our MVP, our 1.0, 2.0, etc.
We split the story map horizontally to show what is in and out of each release.
We can then begin delivery, and as we deliver releases we can track our progress against the story map. Product Managers will often start a sprint planning session by reviewing the story map to ensure that all team members are still on the same page.
User story maps turn a flat backlog into a vivid representation of the customers journey.
A few final tips:
Keep the story map up to date as work progresses so stakeholders can visualise progress in real time;
Use the story map to communicate the roadmap with customers and share the product vision.
User story mapping is an essential practice for every agile team. They are an excellent technique for ensuring the team understands their customers, can clearly articulate the solution and stays focused on delivery.
At Easy Agile we’re converts to the practice of story mapping. In fact we’re so passionate about user story mapping that we created a JIRA add-on that assists teams with conducting sessions. Try Easy Agile TeamRhythm today.
WorkflowWhat is User Story Mapping?
Backlogs are so full of potential, right? Ideas and possibilities for your product to become bigger and better than ever before.
But when you’ve got more than a few items on your list, backlogs are also overwhelming.
Without some kind of clear structure or prioritization, your team won’t know what to work on first.
They might work on whatever they feel like, whatever’s easiest, or most interesting, or not do anything at all.
You need a way to figure out what you should work on first. Not only that, but you need to make sure that what you’re doing delivers value to customers, makes sense for each release, fits into the bigger picture of your organization’s goals.
That’s where user story mapping comes in.
What is user story mapping?
User story mapping is a useful way to organize and prioritize your user stories so that you can schedule your work and design your releases.
It helps you visualize the customer’s journey through your product from start to finish, including all the tasks they’d normally complete along the way.
What’s a user story mapping session?
User story mapping is usually done in sessions over 1-2 days where you bring key people together in the same room.
During these sessions, your product manager (and sometimes other stakeholders) shares their customer insights with the team, who also share their ideas for the product.
Together, you brainstorm user stories, unpack the steps in your customer journey, list out any current issues, and put these onto a user story map. Your user story mapping session gets everyone on the same page about what needs to happen.
What’s a user story map?
A user story map is the artefact or visual board you produce as a result of a user story mapping session.
Your teams will refer to this map throughout each sprint to make sure they’re on schedule, coordinate dependencies, and keep sight of the big picture.
What’s a user story?
In order to understand what a user story map is, it’s important to take a step back and define one of the key components: the user story.
A user story is a goal or outcome that the user or customer wants to achieve. Usually, you’ll write user stories like this:
“As a [persona type], I want to [action] so that [benefit].”
A user story should be the smallest unit of work that can deliver value back to the customer.
You might also consider a user story to be a task that’s written from the user or customer’s perspective. User stories are usually added to your backlog, and from there, you can arrange and prioritize them, and plot them on a user story map so that they’re scheduled to a release or sprint.
Read more about user stories in our blog: How to write good user stories in agile software development.
What does a user story map look like?
User story mapping is traditionally done on a physical story mapping board:
But increasingly, companies are doing their story mapping digitally. If you use Easy Agile User Story Maps, yours might like more like this:
Whether you do your user story mapping physically or digitally, you’ll see both approaches have a few things in common:- A backbone (the row along the top of the sticky notes), often consisting of epics
- Cards or sticky notes with user stories under each item in the backbone
- These stories are sequenced vertically from most important (to the customer) at the top, to least important at the bottom
- Horizontal cut lines or swimlanes define where your releases or sprints start and stop
(Psst: read more in our blog, Anatomy of an agile user story map.)What’s involved in a user story mapping session?
A user story mapping session involves discussing and planning all the parts that make up your story map:
- Your team will get together and decide on the backbone - the big steps that make up your user journey.
- Next they’ll brainstorm user stories - all the little steps that make up the user journey and any issues (bugs or ideas) and add them to the backlog.
- They’ll organize these stories under the backbone item they’re associated with.
- Next they’ll discuss and estimate the work involved in each user story, assigning story points.
- After that, your team can add cut lines to mark out what they’ll deliver and when - either by sprint or release. At this point, you might shuffle some stories around if it makes sense for the user to get them in the same release.
- If everyone’s happy with the plan, the story map is done (for now) and it’s time for your team to start the first sprint.
That seems like an awful lot of effort. So, what’s the point?
What’s the point of user story mapping?
User story mapping benefits both your customers and your team.
Customers get more value delivered, sooner
helps you understand what your customers want. Because the focus is on the customer journey and what tasks they’d need to complete in order to use your product, it helps you prioritize work that’ll help fill in the gaps for customers and deliver value to them.
Teams prioritize and collaborate better
A three-dimensional view helps with prioritization because your team can see what user stories should be grouped within a release to deliver a new experience for users. For example, adding the ability to customize your profile isn’t all that meaningful unless you have a community aspect where users can view other profiles and/or interact with one another. User story mapping helps you fit all the pieces together - and make sure you can realistically deliver them within the sprint or release.
Plus, you can more effectively plan your work and collaborate as a team with your user story map. That’s because you can see the big picture and full customer journey before you start the work.
For more insights, check out our blog on why user story mapping.
What’s the alternative to user story mapping?
If you haven’t done user story mapping until now, you’ve likely been using another method to understand customer requirements and plan/prioritise your work.
The most common approach is known as the “flat backlog”. Essentially, this is a task list that’s ordered from highest to lowest priority, and might be broken up by cut lines for sprints or version releases. The flat backlog is simple (it’s basically a to-do list) but if you have a complex product, lots of teams working on it, dependencies, and a massive, ever-changing backlog… you’re going to need something more robust so that you don’t lose sight of your goals, customer-focus, and priorities.
Speaking of alternatives, check out this little story from one of our customers…
What user story mapping can do for teams
"Our teams were looking for an alternative view to the standard Jira backlog/board view, which doesn't lend itself to organizing and grooming massive backlogs with lots of epics.
The Easy Agile User Story Maps app allows our teams to better organize their work. The user interface is logical, and product owners (who are usually non-technical folk) like the layout of cards in columns under their respective epics.This vertical view seems to foster better communication doing planning meetings and does a great job of providing a visualization of what comes next."
- Christopher Heritage, The Atlassian Team @NextEra Energy
So, as you can see from this example, a lot of teams start with flat backlogs or board views, but find that they outgrow this as their backlog gets bigger.
How user story mapping can upgrade your flat backlog
What makes user story mapping different from the flat backlog is that it has a whole other element. It’s not flat, but more three-dimensional.
You’ve got the list of activities/tasks, but they’re first sorted by how they impact the customer journey. Only then are they prioritized and broken up by when they’re being released.
User story mapping is a little more complex to set up than the flat backlog, but it makes the work more meaningful, customer-focused, and impactful. With a user story map, you can see the big picture and collaborate on it.
We talk more about this in our blog, The difference between a flat product backlog and a user story map.
Try user story mapping inside Jira
Want to know the best way to understand what user story mapping is?
You can’t learn how to ride a bike by reading about it. And you can’t *really* learn what user story mapping is without doing it and experiencing the benefits firsthand.
So, give it a try!
If your team uses Jira for project management and workflows, you can get an add-on that helps you turn that flat backlog into a three dimensional user story map.
Easy Agile User Story Maps for Jira creates the X-axis so you can add your customer journey backbone and organize your stories to fit into this journey. That way, your team gets the big-picture view of what they’re working on, and they can prioritize tasks to deliver maximum value to your customers, sooner.
Best of all, you can do all your user story mapping inside of Jira so that it’s digital, collaborative, and constantly available to your team - even if they’re working remote/distributed. And since it fits in with your existing backlog, you can hit the ground running with pre-filled user stories. In other words, you can expect to save a whole bunch of time.
You can get started with Easy Agile User Story Maps for Jira, with a FREE 30-day trial today or check out the demo here.
Hopefully, you’ll find it just as useful as our customers…
We’ve found that Easy Agile User Story Maps brings the team together in one room. As a result, we find ourselves mapping more as a group, which creates a common understanding. Since using the add-on, we’ve been able to speed up planning and more efficiently conduct large story mapping exercises.
- Mike Doolittle, Product Director @Priceline
Since using Easy Agile User Story Maps, we’ve improved our communication and team alignment, which has helped give us faster results.
- Casey Flynn, Distribution Forecast Analyst @adidas
Easy Agile User Story Maps has helped us visualize our workload and goals, as well as speed up our meetings. We love the simplicity!
- Rafal Zydek, Atlassian Jira and Confluence Expert Administrator @ING Tech Poland
With Easy Agile User Story Maps, we find it much easier to use and navigate Jira. Our favorite features include the ability to drag and drop stories across the Epics, being able to view the work using FixVersion and Sprint Swim Lanes, and Excel export. We’ve been using Story Maps functionality for quite sometime now and I recommend it to other project teams, as well.
- Sathish K Mohanraj, Lean-Agile Coach @Equifax
Learn more about user story mapping
Want to learn more about user story mapping? Check out our User story mapping ultimate guide - it has everything (and we mean everything) you could possibly want to know.
We’re always happy to answer your questions. Just send us a tweet @EasyAgile or contact us if you’re not sure about what user story mapping is, how to do it, or how it could help your team.