Agile Teams

Observability ist ein entscheidender Aspekt bei der Entwicklung und Wartung zuverlässiger Anwendungen, und bei Easy Agile haben wir große Anstrengungen unternommen, um unsere Anwendungen so beobachtbar wie möglich zu machen. In einem kürzlichen Vortrag auf dem Atlas Camp 2025 berichtete Ryan Brown, unser Staff Engineer, über unsere Erfahrungen bei der Umstellung auf Forge und die dabei gewonnenen Erkenntnisse. Hier sind die wichtigsten Höhepunkte seines Vortrags.

Was ist Beobachtbarkeit und warum ist sie wichtig

Bei Observability geht es darum, genügend Daten zu sammeln und zu visualisieren, um den Zustand Ihrer Softwaresysteme zu verstehen und Probleme zu beheben, wenn sie auftreten. Im Gegensatz zur herkömmlichen Überwachung, bei der Sie erfahren, was wann passiert ist, geht Observability noch einen Schritt weiter und erklärt, warum und wie Probleme auftreten.

Für uns bei Easy Agile bedeutet starke Beobachtbarkeit:

• Hat uns geholfen, bessere Entscheidungen über Leistungs- und Infrastrukturanforderungen zu treffen
• Wir haben unseren Kundensupport drastisch verbessert, indem wir Probleme schnell lokalisieren konnten
• Passen wir uns an die Realität moderner, verteilter Anwendungen an

Ryan drückte es in seinem Vortrag so aus: „Als ich damals an Anwendungen gearbeitet habe, liefen wir auf zwei, drei, vielleicht höchstens vier Rechenzentren. Jetzt sprechen wir über Anwendungen, die auf globaler Ebene wachsen und von Menschen auf der ganzen Welt genutzt werden.“

Moderne Anwendungen sind weitaus verteilter als früher, und dicke Frontends werden so komplex wie Backends. Aufgrund dieser Verteilung ist der herkömmliche Ansatz, einige Server manuell zu überprüfen, unzureichend — wir benötigen ausgeklügelte Observability-Lösungen, um zu verstehen, was auf unseren Systemen vor sich geht.

Die drei Säulen der Beobachtbarkeit

Observability basiert auf drei Hauptpfeilern:

Metriken

Dies sind die zahlenbasierten Messungen Ihrer Software — CPU-Auslastung, Anforderungszeiten, Fehleranzahl usw. Aber rohe Zahlen allein sind nicht sehr hilfreich. Der Kontext ist entscheidend — zu wissen, dass Sie fünf Fehler haben, ist etwas ganz anderes als zu wissen, dass Sie innerhalb von zwei Minuten fünf Fehler von einem bestimmten Benutzer auf einem Server haben.

Metriken sind besonders aussagekräftig, wenn es darum geht, Trends im Laufe der Zeit zu identifizieren, sodass Sie genau feststellen können, wann Leistungsprobleme auftraten, oder Änderungen mit dem Systemverhalten korrelieren können.

Logs

Logs sind oft das Erste, womit Ingenieure Erfahrung sammeln, wenn es um Observability geht. Sie bieten detaillierte Aufzeichnungen von Ereignissen und sind der Eckpfeiler, um zu verstehen, was in Ihrem System vor sich geht. Sie liefern mehr Informationen als nur Metriken und erfassen nicht nur, was passiert ist, sondern auch Details zu jedem Ereignis, das eingetreten ist.

Sie sind reicher an Informationen, generieren aber auch mehr Daten. Logs könnten Ihnen beispielsweise sagen, dass ein Fehler aufgetreten ist, weil eine API eine schlechte Antwort zurückgegeben hat — aber das allein sagt Ihnen immer noch nicht, warum die Downstream-API ausgefallen ist.

Spuren

Mithilfe von Traces können Sie nachvollziehen, was auf all Ihren Systemen passiert, die zusammenarbeiten. Sie verfolgen Transaktionen, während sie verschiedene Dienste durchlaufen, und zeigen Ihnen genau, was passiert, wenn ein Benutzer auf eine Schaltfläche klickt oder eine Aktion ausführt.

„Die Rückverfolgung ist überraschend einfach“, erklärte Ryan. „Sie haben lediglich eine eindeutige Kennung für eine Transaktion, die von einem System zum nächsten System gemeinsam genutzt wird.“

Traces sind besonders nützlich, wenn Sie diese Kennung Endbenutzern zur Verfügung stellen können, wenn etwas schief geht. Diese ID kann Ihnen genau zeigen, was bei dieser Transaktion passiert ist, sodass das Rätselraten bei der Fehlerbehebung ein Kinderspiel ist.

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Beobachtbarkeit bei Connect und Forge

Unser aktueller Connect-Ansatz

Bei Easy Agile haben wir umfassende Observability für unsere Connect-Apps implementiert.

• Für alle unsere Anwendungen erfasste Metriken, Logs und Traces
• All diese Daten werden an einen Observability-Dienst eines Drittanbieters gesendet, um eine zentrale Ansicht zu erhalten
• Frontend-Komponenten, die auch Observability-Daten an denselben Dienst senden

Dieser Ansatz reduziert die kognitive Belastung unserer Techniker und bietet einen vollständigen Überblick über die Benutzerabläufe und das, was in unseren Systemen passiert. Dafür empfiehlt Ryan, kommerzielle Dienste wie Datadog oder New Relic oder sogar Open-Source-Optionen wie Signoz zu verwenden.

Bedenken hinsichtlich des Übergangs für Forge

Als wir uns Forge zum ersten Mal ansahen, hatten wir mehrere Fragen:

• Wie gut würde Tracing mit dem Kommunikationsmodell von Forge funktionieren?
• Könnten wir unsere eigenen benutzerdefinierten Metriken definieren?
• Wären wir in der Lage, Metriken und Logs sowohl vom Frontend als auch vom Backend zu sammeln?
• Könnten wir bestimmte Benutzertransaktionen zu Supportzwecken identifizieren?

Zum Zeitpunkt unserer Evaluierung waren Forge-Funktionen die primäre verfügbare Rechenoption, was Fragen zur Funktionsweise von Standard-Tracing-Bibliotheken im einzigartigen Kommunikationsmodell von Forge aufwarf.

Experimentieren mit einer einfachen App

Anstatt zu versuchen, eines unserer größeren Produkte zu migrieren, haben wir eine einfache „Sprint Notes“ -App erstellt, um die Beobachtbarkeit auf Forge zu testen. Dadurch konnten wir:

• Iterieren Sie schnell durch verschiedene Forge-Topologien
• Konzentrieren Sie sich beim Experiment auf die Beobachtbarkeit
• Beinhaltet alle notwendigen Komponenten (UI, API, Datenbank)

Wir haben diese App durch mehrere Phasen geführt:

1. Verbinde dich auf Forge: Unsere Connect-App über Forge ausführen
2. Forge mit Fernbedienungen: Verwenden Sie zwei Ansätze: Aufrufen von Fernbedienungen über Forge-Funktionen und Aufrufen von Fernbedienungen direkt von der Benutzeroberfläche aus‍
3. Forge Native: Die App komplett neu schreiben, um die Forge-Funktionen und den Entitätsspeicher zu verwenden

Wichtigste Ergebnisse

Auf Forge verbinden

Wenn Sie unsere Connect-App über Forge ausführen:

• Unsere gesamte bestehende Beobachtbarkeit funktionierte ohne Änderungen
• Frontend- und Backend-Metriken funktionierten weiterhin wie zuvor
• Die Ablaufverfolgungskennungen wurden korrekt weitergegeben
• Logs und Metriken wurden nicht in der Atlassian Developer Console angezeigt (was sinnvoll ist, da wir keine Forge-Module verwendet haben)

Die Observability-Story für Connect on Forge ist ziemlich einfach — sie funktioniert einfach. Ryan merkte an: „Die gesamte Observability, die wir auf Connect eingerichtet hatten, funktionierte genauso wie zuvor. Es gab keine großen Änderungen oder Probleme mit dem, was wir dort gesehen haben.“

Wir haben sogar mit verschiedenen Methoden experimentiert, um Daten an unseren Observability-Dienst zu senden, einschließlich der Verwendung eines Proxys unter unserer eigenen Domain, und alles funktionierte konsistent, solange die richtigen Content-Security-Header gesetzt waren.

Forge mit Fernbedienungen

Für Forge mit Fernbedienungen haben wir Folgendes gefunden:

• Frontend- und Backend-Observability funktionierten größtenteils
• Wir mussten permissions.external.fetch.client so einstellen, dass Metriken vom Frontend aus gesendet werden können
• Das Hinzufügen dieser Berechtigungen erforderte ein Upgrade der Hauptversion
• Metriken erfassten nicht alle API-Aufrufe, insbesondere Frontend-Aufrufe an Atlas-APIs
• Tracing-Identifikatoren waren Remote-Anrufern nicht zugänglich, wodurch die durchgängige Verfolgung eingeschränkt wurde

„Das ist ein bisschen enttäuschend... wir haben festgestellt, dass Forge bei Anrufen an unsere Fernbedienungen Tracing-Identifikatoren für die Verwendung im Backend generierte, aber leider waren diese Identifikatoren dann nicht dem ausgesetzt, was diese Fernanrufe tätigte“, erklärte Ryan.

Wir konnten zwar Protokolle in der Developer Console sehen und einige Metriken wurden erfasst, aber die Unfähigkeit, Tracing-Identifikatoren an Aufrufer weiterzuleiten, bedeutete, dass wir keine vollständige Rückverfolgbarkeit von der Benutzeroberfläche zur Datenbank erreichen oder Transaktions-IDs den Endbenutzern anzeigen konnten, ohne Problemumgehungen zu implementieren.

Forge-Einheimischer

Mit einem vollständig nativen Forge-Ansatz:

• Benutzerdefinierte Metriken und einfaches Tracing sind möglich, erfordern jedoch einen erheblichen Aufwand.
• Wir mussten eine benutzerdefinierte Handhabung mit Bibliotheken wie OpenTelemetry implementieren
• Die Beobachtbarkeit der Benutzeroberfläche blieb ähnlich wie bei der Remote-Implementierung.
• Wir könnten über undokumentierte Forge-API-Funktionen auf Korrelations-IDs zugreifen

Wir haben es geschafft, einen Machbarkeitsnachweis zu erstellen, der Spuren von Forge-Funktionen zu unserem Observability-Dienst zeigt, obwohl die Implementierung einer vollständigen Datenspeicherverfolgung zusätzliche Arbeit erfordern würde.

Empfehlungen und bewährte Verfahren

Basierend auf unseren Ergebnissen empfehlen wir:

1. Legen Sie Basiswerte für die Beobachtbarkeit fest

Finden Sie heraus, welche Daten Sie wirklich benötigen, anstatt alles zu sammeln. Observability-Dienste werden nach Volumen abgerechnet, sodass das Sammeln unnötiger Daten schnell teuer werden kann.

2. Verwenden Sie OpenTelemetry‍

Es entspricht der internen Implementierung von Forge und bietet eine gute Standardisierung. Es ist zwar schwieriger zu verwenden als einige sofort einsatzbereite Lösungen, aber die langfristigen Vorteile sind es wert.

‍3. Ziehen Sie einen Observability-Proxy in Betracht

Dies ermöglicht:

• Authentifizierung für eingehende Metriken
• Zusätzlichen Kontext hinzufügen
• Datenredigierung für sensible Informationen
• Entkopplung Ihrer Implementierung von bestimmten Anbietern

In Kombination mit OpenTelemetry bedeutet dieser Ansatz, dass Ihre Forge-Komponenten nicht wissen müssen, welchen Observability-Dienst Sie verwenden, wodurch Berechtigungsänderungen vermieden werden, wenn Sie den Anbieter wechseln.

4. Plane Genehmigungsaktualisierungen strategisch

Da sie wichtige Versionsupgrades erfordern, sollten Sie sie frühzeitig in Ihre Entwicklung einbeziehen.

5. Weitere wichtige Überlegungen

• Größere Versionsupgrades sind erforderlich, wenn Berechtigungen für Observability hinzugefügt werden
• Die Dokumentation für den Export von Logs und Metriken ist technisch korrekt, kann aber leicht falsch interpretiert werden
• Traces werden in Remote-Implementierungen nicht automatisch an Aufrufer weitergegeben

Abschließende Gedanken

Das Erreichen aller drei Säulen der Beobachtbarkeit auf Forge ist möglich, erfordert jedoch je nach Ihrer Implementierungsstrategie unterschiedliche Ansätze:

• Connect on Forge funktioniert nahtlos mit vorhandener Observability
• Forge mit Fernbedienungen erfordert eine zusätzliche Konfiguration
• Forge Native benötigt mehr benutzerdefinierte Implementierung

Diese Experimente werden für Open Source vorbereitet, also bleiben Sie dran Ryans LinkedIn für Updates.

The days of 'doing Agile' are over. As we enter 2025, organizations’ relationship with agility continues to evolve.

Economic pressures, technological advances, and hard-learned lessons are pushing organizations to rethink their approach to agility. While many companies still struggle with meaningful transformation, clear patterns are emerging that signal where agile practices are headed this year.

Drawing on insights from Agile experts and practitioners, here are eight key trends that we see defining how we work this year.

1. The Return to Agile Fundamentals

Key Highlights:

• Movement away from heavyweight frameworks back to core Agile principles and values
• Emphasis on simplicity and delivering customer value rather than ceremonial processes
• Integration of Agile practices into daily work without drawing attention to them

While large organizations continue to rely on structured frameworks to drive consistency across teams, we're seeing a growing groundswell of support for getting back to basics. This isn't about abandoning structure entirely - it's about finding the right balance. 

Teams are increasingly focused on streamlining processes, embracing continuous improvement, and maintaining an unwavering focus on delivering real customer value.

The pendulum is swinging back from scaled frameworks to fundamental engineering practices. Teams are incorporating agile practices into their daily workflows without the overhead of excessive ceremonies. Delivering with feature toggles, continuous integration, and trunk-based development are becoming more important than analysing burndown charts and a calendar full of unproductive ceremonies.

Expert take:

“Rather than telling people how to do their jobs, work with them to set the goals for a process that would make them and the company more successful. Measure success based on improved team behavior rather than adherence to a set of rules. Instead of Agile, push for agility. In that sense, Agile is never really over. It’s just transforming into what it should have always been.” 

- Jeff Gothelf, Product Management Author, Speaker, Trainer, and Coach

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2. The Evolution of Agile Roles

Key Highlights:

• More emphasis on technical leadership within teams rather than process-focused roles
• Shift from dedicated Scrum Master positions to embedded agile leadership
• Product management roles evolving to incorporate stronger business analysis capabilities

The job market for Agile roles is undergoing a significant transformation. Pure Scrum Master positions are evolving into hybrid roles that combine technical expertise with process leadership. This isn't just semantics - it reflects a deeper understanding that effective agile leadership requires both technical context and facilitation skills.

Engineering managers are expected to understand both system architecture and team dynamics. Instead of relying on external agile coaches, they're building these capabilities within their technical leadership. The focus has shifted from process adherence to technical mentorship and delivery optimization.

Product managers are also adapting to this new reality. They're becoming what some call "super ICs" - professionals who blend product thinking with solid business analysis skills. It's no longer enough to just manage a backlog; today's product leaders need to speak the language of both business and technology.

Expert take:

“First of all, I think it needs to be said, we should not panic. You do not need to abandon your career as a Scrum Master, Agile Coach, or Agilist of any kind. But we do need to think about it differently. Some suggest broadening your skills, which can certainly make you more valuable. Become a ‘technologist who is a Scrum Master’ or a ‘manager with agile coaching skills’. 

Keep in mind, this also may not require you to actually learn new skills, but to be smarter about how you position yourself and your existing capabilities. Know that organizations are looking for agile to be ‘baked in’ to the people they hire. You should broaden the scope of the types of roles you are searching for as well, because you might be surprised. I like to find companies that mention agile skills on job boards, then go and scour all of their open postings to see where else I might be able to apply.” 

- Brian Link, Business Agility Coach, Author, and Speaker 

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3. Cross-Functional Teams Become Truly Cross-Functional

Key Highlights:

• Teams capable of handling end-to-end delivery from discovery to implementation
• Breaking down traditional specializations in favor of full-stack capabilities
• Reducing dependencies between teams through better cross-functional team structure

The definition of "cross-functional" has evolved significantly. Modern engineering teams aren't just mixing developers and testers - they're creating truly autonomous units capable of handling the entire software lifecycle.

In effect, forward-thinking organizations are breaking down the remaining silos between frontend, backend, and DevOps specialists in favor of truly full-stack capabilities. Teams are increasingly taking ownership of the entire delivery pipeline, from initial discovery through to production deployment.

The most exciting part? Teams that embrace this approach are discovering they can deliver features faster and with better quality than ever before. When you own the entire process, you naturally make better decisions at every step. Plus, this approach not only avoids handovers and dependencies but also helps those teams develop into Product teams over time - armed with both domain knowledge as well as technical expertise.

Expert take:

“The nature of work is evolving. As challenges grow more complex and the pace of innovation accelerates, cross-functional collaboration is no longer a luxury — it’s a necessity. By embracing fluid roles, shared ownership, and open input, teams can unlock their full potential and deliver solutions that stand out in an increasingly competitive landscape.

So, the next time you hear someone talk about cross-functional collaboration, challenge them to think beyond meetings and updates. True collaboration means breaking down walls, embracing diverse contributions, and working together in ways that transcend traditional boundaries. Only then can we tap into the collective intelligence of our teams and achieve greatness together.” 

- Shubham Sharma, Senior Software Quality Engineer, Qantas

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4. Lean Takes Center Stage

Key Highlights:

• Growing adoption of "NoEstimates" and forecasting approaches over traditional estimation
• Emphasis on smaller, more frequent releases with clear business context
• Increased focus on flow efficiency and waste reduction in processes

The shift toward leaner practices is revolutionizing how teams approach delivery. Organizations are moving beyond story points and velocity metrics to focus on flow efficiency and cycle time. The "NoEstimates" movement isn't about abandoning predictability - it's about finding more reliable ways to forecast and deliver value with less overhead.

This shift toward leaner practices is complemented by a focus on smaller, frequent releases that tie directly to business outcomes.

Organizations are getting better at lean principles to identify and eliminate unnecessary steps in their processes, with a singular focus on value delivery. 

Expert take:

“Asking whether Lean is still relevant in 2025 is akin to questioning the relevance of continuous improvement itself. The answer is, of course, a resounding "YES!" However, the challenge lies not in Lean’s principles but in how effectively organizations implement and sustain their improvement efforts.

While many organizations adopt Lean methodologies, a significant gap remains between intention and execution. Common pitfalls include inadequate leadership commitment, failure to integrate Lean with organizational strategy, and lack of workforce engagement. Lean’s relevance hinges on addressing these challenges head-on by embedding continuous improvement into the DNA of an organization.”

- Patrick Adams, CEO and Executive Lean Coach, Lean Solutions

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5. Quality and Technical Excellence Make A Resurgence

Key Highlights:

• Renewed emphasis on XP practices and technical craftsmanship
• Greater focus on sustainable testing strategies combining automated and human testing
• Continuous refactoring and technical excellence becoming primary concerns

Technical excellence is back in focus. While the past decade saw many organizations chase velocity at the expense of quality, engineering teams are rediscovering that there's no sustainable agility without solid technical practices.

Extreme Programming (XP) practices, once considered too rigorous for many organizations, are seeing renewed adoption. And modern tooling has made these practices more accessible, but they still require disciplined engineering culture to implement effectively.

Testing strategies are evolving too, blending automated and manual strategies to ensure robust and adaptive systems. Advancements in testing technology—including AI-assisted tools—are enabling faster and more accurate testing processes, so quality remains a priority even in accelerated delivery cycles. 

Continuous refactoring has become a primary concern, especially as organizations deal with the technical debt accumulated during rapid pandemic-era digital transformations. Teams are finding that regular system evolution isn't just about clean code - it's about maintaining the ability to respond quickly to business needs without sacrificing stability.

Expert take:

“For me, XP is at the core of Continuous Delivery, which is also the foundation on which DevOps is built.

I don't think that you can achieve Continuous Delivery without the kind of polyglot collaboration between all of the parties involved in creating software. How can you Continuously Deliver if the Ops team, security team, testing team, dev team, or product team is in a silo? You can't.

I think that both of those approaches represent a genuine paradigm shift - it's a complete change in focus, not only about how to practice software development but really what software development is. I think of it much more in terms of it being this exploratory process of discovery and part of the way in which we organize our work is to enable that - to allow ourselves the freedom to discover things, learn new things, change direction, and discard the bad things.” 

- Dave Farley, Independent Software Developer and Consultant, Founder and Director of Continuous Delivery Ltd.

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6. Business Agility Extends Beyond IT

Key Highlights:

• Expansion of Agile principles beyond software development into broader business operations
• Integration of product-oriented thinking across organizations
• Focus on measurable business outcomes and value metrics

The walls between IT and business are finally crumbling. While software teams have been practicing Agile for years, we're now seeing these principles take root across entire organizations. A significant milestone in this evolution is the recent acquisition of Agile Alliance by Product Management Institute - a clear signal of the broadening demand for agile skills and expertise across different business functions.

Teams are adopting product-oriented thinking throughout the organization and focusing on measurable business outcomes rather than just project deliverables.

The data backs this up: while IT teams lead with 70% Agile adoption, product and R&D teams aren't far behind. Even traditional business operations and marketing teams are embracing agile practices, with adoption rates of 28% and 20% respectively. This shift is driven by necessity - in a world where market conditions change rapidly, no department can afford to operate in quarterly planning cycles anymore.

Consider Unilever's experience: By applying agile practices beyond their tech departments into marketing and product development teams, they've reduced time-to-market for new products by nearly 30%. This agility has enabled them to respond more effectively to changing consumer demands, particularly during times of economic uncertainty.

Expert take:

“Agile innovation has revolutionized the software industry, which has arguably undergone more rapid and profound change than any other area of business over the past 30 years. Now it is poised to transform nearly every other function in every industry. At this point, the greatest impediment is not the need for better methodologies, empirical evidence of significant benefits, or proof that agile can work outside IT. It is the behavior of executives. Those who learn to lead agile’s extension into a broader range of business activities will accelerate profitable growth.” 

- Darrell Rigby, Jeff Sutherland, Hirotaka Takeuchi for Harvard Business Review. 

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7. Agile Adapts to Remote and Hybrid Work

Key Highlights:

• Evolution of Agile practices to better support distributed and hybrid teams
• Development of new collaboration patterns for remote work
• Focus on asynchronous communication and documentation

Remote work has forced a fundamental rethinking of agile practices. The tools have evolved - Jira, Trello, and Slack are table stakes now - but the real innovation is happening in how teams structure their work and communication patterns to maintain the same level of engagement, communication, and velocity as in-person teams.

Distributed teams are developing new approaches to traditional ceremonies. Asynchronous standup updates combined with focused synchronous discussion time. Sprint planning split into async preparation and live refinement sessions. Retrospectives that blend individual reflection time with group synthesis.

Documentation, once seen as anti-agile, has found its place in the remote world. But it's not your grandfather's documentation - teams are using tools like Notion and Confluence to create living documents that evolve with their products. Architecture decision records (ADRs) and technical RFCs have become crucial tools for maintaining alignment across distributed teams.

Expert take:

“At one point, in-person face-to-face communication was the most effective way to communicate. This was still very true back in 2001 when Agile was defined, and this is why it was essential to document that in the Agile principles. However, the state of technology back then lacked the conductivity or capabilities to make remote possible, leaving workers desk-bound. The hardwired phone, desktop system, and limited email were what we had. So Agile worked to collocate teams and promoted in-person face-to-face meetings whenever possible in its first decade of existence. But that was 20 years ago.

For Agile, with today’s technology, we are not going against the intent of how we framed effective communications. On the contrary, the technology has helped remove the impediment that most large multinational and distributed teams were dealing with when adopting Agile — we can now have everybody face-to-face regardless of where they are in the world. Furthermore, Agile helps to give the hybrid workplace a set of values and principles to help the hybrid work environment prosper.”

• Ray Arell, Founder and Executive Director, nuAgility

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8. Economic Influences Shape Practice

Key Highlights:

• Greater emphasis on cost-effectiveness and demonstrable ROI
• Focus on π-shaped people and efficient team structures
• Renewed attention to productivity and outcome-based metrics

Economic realities are pushing organizations to rethink their agile implementations. The focus has shifted from process purity to practical outcomes. Teams are being asked not just to deliver features, but to demonstrate their impact on business metrics - aka cost-effectiveness and return on investment.

Value stream mapping has moved from theory to practice, as organizations work to understand and optimize their delivery pipelines. The most effective teams are those that can connect their technical metrics (lead time, deployment frequency, MTTR) to business outcomes (revenue impact, customer satisfaction, market share).

The investment in T-shaped individuals - those who combine deep expertise with broad capabilities - is proving particularly valuable in this environment. These team members can adapt to changing needs and help reduce the coordination overhead that often plagues specialized teams.

Expert take:

"Looking ahead, I anticipate a renewed emphasis on certainty, optimization, and individual performance metrics. This shift seems likely because developing self-management is challenging—it's a slow process for many and often tempting to fall back into familiar command-and-control habits. Unfortunately, such a trend risks diverting focus from user-centric goals and outcome-based measures, potentially undermining the core principles that have made Agile so impactful. To address this, I believe the Agile community must strengthen its foundation, focusing on creating working products and by leveraging tools like Evidence-Based Management to help measure the right metrics and progress indicators that some organizations require."

- Simon Bourk, Professional Scrum Trainer, Master Integral Coach TM

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Looking Ahead

As we move into 2025, we're seeing the emergence of a more mature, nuanced approach to agility. Organizations are moving beyond the framework debates and certification chases to focus on what truly matters: building high-quality software that delivers business value efficiently.

The most successful teams will be those that can:

• Maintain technical excellence while adapting to changing business needs
• Balance autonomy with accountability through clear outcome metrics
• Leverage automation and AI without losing sight of craftsmanship
• Scale agile practices through organization-wide adoption
• Adapt their practices to support distributed, async-first work patterns

The future of Agile isn't about choosing between SAFe and Scrum, or debating the merits of estimation. It's about building engineering organizations that can consistently deliver value while maintaining the technical excellence needed for long-term sustainability. The teams that get this right won't just survive the next wave of change - they'll lead it.

Exciting times indeed.

Picture this all-too-common scenario: Your teams have been working diligently across multiple departments. They've successfully developed an MVP following perfect agile practices. The burndown charts are beautiful. The collaboration was seamless. The code is clean, tested, and ready to ship.

There's just one small problem – when you release it to your users... crickets. No one uses it. No one cares.

Sound familiar? You're not alone.

The Build Trap: A Silent Killer of Agile Success

Many agile teams find themselves trapped in a cycle of building features that don't deliver real value to their customers. They've fallen into what product strategy expert Melissa Perri calls "the build trap" – focusing on outputs (like features shipped) rather than outcomes (like solving real customer problems).

As Charlie Hill, VP of Strategic Design at IBM, explains:

"The most important question for you to ask is, can you accomplish an outcome that a user would recognize as better than the other options available? And can you get it to that user before your competition does? Because if you can't, it's going to be a struggle. If you spend too much time measuring internal velocity, you risk falling in love with a very efficient process but losing sight of the market."

Understanding the Value Exchange System

At the heart of successful agile development lies a fundamental concept: the Value Exchange System.

It works like this:

1. On one side, customers have specific problems, wants, and needs
2. On the other side, businesses create products or services to resolve these problems
3. Customers realize value only when their problems are genuinely solved
4. Only then do they provide value back to the business through loyalty, revenue, and advocacy

This reciprocal relationship forms the foundation of customer-centric agile. When teams focus on solving real customer problems rather than just shipping features, they create a virtuous cycle benefiting both the customer and the business.

Why Traditional Agile Often Misses the Mark

Agile methodologies were born from a desire to be more responsive to change and deliver value faster. But somewhere along the way, many teams lost sight of the ultimate goal – delighting customers. They became more focused on:

• Sprint velocity over customer impact
• Story points over solved problems
• Feature completion over user satisfaction
• Process efficiency over market success

Jeff Bezos, founder of Amazon, puts it perfectly:

"There are many ways to center a business. You can be competitor focused, you can be product focused, you can be technology focused, you can be business model focused... But in my view, obsessive customer focus is by far the most protective of day one vitality."

The Six Pillars of Customer-Centric Agile

To embrace truly customer-centric agile development, teams need to adopt these fundamental principles:

1. Empathy First

• Get out from behind your desk and observe customers in their natural environment
• Listen to their frustrations and celebrate their wins
• See the world through their eyes before attempting solutions

2. Outcomes Over Outputs

• Focus on the impact your features create, not just their completion
• Measure success by customer problems solved
• Ask "How does this improve our users' lives?" before "How fast can we ship it?"

3. Continuous Discovery

• Make learning about customers an ongoing process, not a one-time event
• Regularly conduct user interviews and analyze usage data
• Keep testing assumptions and validating decisions

4. Experimentation Mindset

• Embrace uncertainty and be willing to test assumptions
• Use prototypes and MVPs to validate ideas before full commitment
• Learn from failures as much as successes

5. Cross-Functional Collaboration

• Ensure everyone on the team has access to customer insights
• Break down silos between product, development, and user research
• Make customer understanding everyone's responsibility

6. Rapid Iteration

• Be prepared to pivot quickly based on customer feedback
• Maintain technical practices that enable fast response to learning
• Value adaptation over following a plan

Getting Started with Customer-Centric Agile

While the principles are straightforward, implementing them requires careful thought and systematic approach.

Begin by assessing your current state. Take time to understand how your team currently gathers customer insights. Look at your feature adoption rates and usage patterns. Most importantly, examine how you measure success - are you tracking outputs like velocity, or outcomes like customer impact?

Next, focus on building customer empathy across your entire team. Schedule regular customer conversations - aim for at least one per sprint. Create opportunities for team members from all functions to observe customers using your product in their natural environment. Make sharing customer insights a regular part of your agile ceremonies, not just something that happens in product meetings.

Finally, start adjusting your metrics to reflect your customer-centric focus. While velocity and story points have their place, they shouldn't be your primary measures of success. Begin tracking customer outcomes and impact. Monitor feature adoption and engagement. Pay attention to how your work affects customer satisfaction and retention.

Want to dive deeper into implementing these principles?

We've written a comprehensive guide that does just that and provides detailed frameworks for implementation.

In "Understanding Customer Value in Agile," you'll find practical techniques, real-world case studies, and step-by-step guides for transforming your agile practice. Each chapter builds on these foundational principles to help you create truly customer-centric development processes.

Get your free copy today.

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Weaving alignment and empathy into team dynamics can revolutionize software delivery. So why aren't we all doing that?

It's a real challenge for organizations with numerous teams contributing to complex software, to achieve real alignment and consensus on user needs. But it's one well worth pursuing. Striking a balance between alignment on business goals and customer empathy ensures that the software your teams are developing truly resonates with users and fulfills those business goals.

Why Alignment Matters in Agile Programs

Alignment is more than just goal setting across teams. It's about connecting workflows, acknowledging challenges, and crafting solutions that encompass everyone’s perspectives, including the needs of your users. As Tony Camacho shared on the Easy Agile Podcast:

"Alignment isn’t just about goals—it’s about understanding each other’s workflows, needs, and challenges to create solutions that work for everyone."

This comprehensive strategic alignment is crucial for steering teams in the same direction. In large enterprises, team alignment means that agile release trains can function cohesively, and strategic business goals are successfully translated across diverse teams and departments. Strong alignment empowers cross-functional teams to sustain momentum and unity at scale, even as the product roadmap evolves. For agile release trains, effective alignment means that everyone is doing their part, pulling in the same direction, and delivering successful software.  

Customer Empathy and User-Centric Development

Customer empathy is the cornerstone of aligning business goals with user needs and developing software that delivers a seamless user experience. It's about getting to know your users, their needs, and their experience with your product so that you can create better solutions for them.

"The key to meeting user needs is empathy. When teams deeply understand their users, every product decision naturally aligns with providing value."

Tony Comacho

This ethos fuels decision-making and design that prioritizes user needs and values over functional deliverables. It's great to build and release something, but not-so-great if nobody uses it.  Agile leaders who embed empathy within their teams cultivate a customer-driven culture, resulting in software solutions that address genuine challenges and delight their audience.

Empathy enhances the process of gathering requirements, conducting user testing, and embracing iterative design. Combined with effective agile program management, empathy aligns business goals with user expectations, and is a great way to improve engagement with your software and reduce churn, paving the way for successful software delivery and user retention.

Building Clarity for Effective Collaboration

Building impactful software at scale demands effective collaboration and clarity.

"Effective collaboration is rooted in clarity. Teams need to feel supported by having a shared vision and understanding of the product journey."

Tony Comacho

Cross-team alignment revolves around establishing a unified vision and setting clear goals and expectations across the agile release train. For enterprise agile solutions that support PI Planning and Product Roadmapping, upholding this clarity allows large teams to work independently yet cohesively, ensuring a targeted approach to addressing both business and user needs.

How to Achieve Agile Alignment at Scale

To encourage team alignment around user needs in your organization:

• Invest in User Research & Design: Start talking to your users; and keep talking to them. Implement user-focused design practices, gathering insights from users throughout the development stages to effectively align user needs and business goals.
• Share Vision and Goals: Regularly communicate with your teams about business objectives and user needs, ensuring they are central to your agile program.
• Use Alignment Tools and Frameworks: Leverage agile tools that help you track objectives and development milestones to ensure team alignment and cross-team collaboration. Make goals and priorities easily accessible for all your teams.
• Encourage Transparent Communication: Cultivate an environment where feedback crosses team boundaries, maintaining cross-team alignment and empathy.‍

The Benefits of Alignment and Empathy in Software Delivery

Better outcomes for your software start when business goals are aligned with user needs. Programs that place strategic agile alignment and customer empathy at the forefront, not only meet user expectations but improve the value they offer to their customers. With good agile program management, the outcome is a streamlined, effective agile release train that consistently delivers exceptional software solutions. Which is what we all want, right?

As you work towards better alignment in your agile program, nurturing empathy and clarity can unlock significant gains in satisfaction for your users and for your teams, which is great news for the overall success of your program.

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🎧 Want to hear more from Tony? Listen to The power of team alignment on the Easy Agile Podcast.

At Easy Agile, we’re constantly looking for new ways to improve our products, and one of the ways we foster innovation is through Dash Days—a focused period where our team steps away from daily tasks to experiment, explore, and reimagine how our tools can better serve customers.

During our most recent Dash Days, we took a fresh look at the user interface of two of our flagship products, Easy Agile TeamRhythym and Easy Agile Programs. The goal was to enhance interaction and discoverability, so users can experience the full value of our tools without unnecessary complexity.

Here’s a glimpse into our thought process, challenges, and the exciting solutions we explored.

The challenge

As Easy Agile TeamRhythym and Easy Agile Programs have evolved, we’ve introduced powerful features designed to give users more control and flexibility. However, as new capabilities have been added, the interface has become more elaborate. For us, this presents an opportunity—an opportunity to take a step back, simplify the experience, and help users unlock more of what our products offer.

To address this, we brought people from across the business together to brainstorm how we could improve the experience in both products. Through these sessions, we identified a few core opportunities:

• Discoverability: How do we make it easier for users to find and use the powerful features built into our tools?
• Visibility: What’s the best way to surface the right information and features when users need them? 
• Consistency: How do we create a more uniform experience within and across our products to make navigation intuitive?

Armed with these insights, we then set out to explore solutions tailored to each product’s unique challenges. 

A more personalized experience with Easy Agile Programs

For Programs, we focused on three “how might we” questions to reframe our challenges into opportunities: 

1. How might we create more focus on the actions users are trying to complete?
2. How might we make navigation more intuitive and easy?
3. How might we help users with more context about where they are in the app at any given screen? 

Out of the many solutions we explored, the one that got us the most excited was the idea of an Easy Agile Programs Home Screen—a personalized dashboard designed to guide users based on where they are in their planning cycle. 

This home screen could adapt based on where users are in their journey, offering relevant guidance and actions.

• For new users, the home screen could provide clear onboarding steps and easy access to help, so they can get started quickly and confidently.
• For experienced users, it could offer insights and key actions related to their progress, so they can stay focused on what matters most. Users might even see data summarizing their accomplishments, which makes it easier to share successes with their teams.

Whether someone’s brand new to the product or deep into execution, the home screen could be a great way to guide and coach our users—helping them answer questions like, "What should I be doing next?" or "What extra value am I missing out on?". 

A more focused interface for Easy Agile TeamRhythm

For TeamRhythym, our three key “how might we” questions were:

• How might we provide more focus within the User Story Map during sprint planning?
• How might we improve the discoverability of issues without epics?
• How might we enhance the layout to highlight key features and improve overall usability? 

With these questions in mind, we explored a range of ideas to simplify sprint planning and make it easier for users to prep, plan, and review their work, whether they’re using Scrum or Kanban.

Sprint planning can sometimes feel overwhelming when you have multiple sprints competing for attention. To help users focus, so we explored the idea of introducing a focused view during sprint planning. 

• This would allow users to zoom in on a specific sprint and the backlog alone, while collapsing others. 
• Each issue would have its own row in the detailed view, and users can drag and drop either an entire row or drag individual issues to quickly rank them based on priorities.
• The sprint view will also hide epics that don’t have linked issues in the current sprint, giving users a cleaner view of what’s relevant to their current work.

We also looked at ways to enhance the User Story Map interface to bring the most useful tools and features to the forefront. By improving how key functionality is presented, we’re helping teams quickly access what they need, when they need it, enabling them to stay productive without interruption.

This way, we can create a smoother, more focused experience for teams using TeamRhythm, so they can focus on what’s in front of them without being distracted by everything else.

Your turn. What do you think?

At Easy Agile, we’re always thinking about what comes next. 

These ideas aren’t on our official roadmap just yet, but they’re the kind of innovations we’re excited to explore.

If you think these changes would improve your experience with Easy Agile TeamRhythm and Easy Agile Programs, let us know! Your feedback helps us decide what to prioritize, so we can continue building tools that truly make a difference for your teams.

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The 17th State of Agile Report shared that 93% of executives thought that their teams could do the same amount of work in half the time, if their teams collaborated better.

That's quite a statistic. We’ll leave it up to you to decide whether this reflects a lack of efficiency due to poor collaboration, or a disconnect between leadership expectations and the realities faced by development teams.

What we do know is that improving team collaboration has benefits and that improved collaboration is a key benefit of effective agile practices.

So if you think your team could work more effectively, here are six tips for improving team collaboration that we think will make your working life better, and help you deliver for your customers.

1. Agile Teams Are Cross-Functional

Cross-functional teams are the backbone of agile collaboration. It's Agile 101:

The best architectures, requirements, and designs emerge from self-organizing teams.

Manifesto for Agile Software Development

Ideally, your agile team should be able to deliver work independently. The skills and expertise of your team should allow you to handle diverse tasks without creating dependencies on other teams. You can take ownership of the software you're delivering.

The benefit of organizing into cross-functional teams is a greater shared understanding of your project, where you can each see how the pieces fit together. This type of collaboration supports the efficient flow of work and ensures that knowledge and skills are consistently shared.

2. Take an Iterative Approach

Or to put it another way, make it easier to fail fast, so your team can learn why, and correct your course. By breaking down large projects into manageable increments, your team can focus on delivering small, functional parts of working software at regular intervals. This approach goes hand-in-hand with continual feedback from users, ensuring that issues are uncovered quickly and dealt with just as fast. This shared team focus on user feedback, and the shared purpose and collaboration that comes with it, is a key benefit of agile development.

3. Maintain Regular and Transparent Communication

Daily stand-ups, sprint reviews, and planning meetings are all designed to foster regular and clear communication. You and your team should see these meetings as an opportunity to share ideas, discuss progress and blockers, and collaborate. If your daily stand-up is nothing more than a shopping list of tasks, then you're doing it wrong.

If your daily stand-up is nothing more than a shopping list of tasks, then you're doing it wrong.

Someone who has wasted too much time in shopping-list meetings.

Beyond team meetings, clear communication is important anywhere the details of your work are shared. Agile tools like Easy Agile TeamRhythm provide a central platform for prioritizing work and tracking progress. With a central source of truth that everyone can access to understand goals, priorities, and team commitment, collaboration can be more effective, keeping the team aligned and focused.

4. Conduct Team Retrospectives

Hot take: regular retrospectives are the most important agile practice your team can adopt.

Team retrospectives provide a structured opportunity to reflect on your work and discuss how it can be done better next time. This is team-led improvement because you and your team are in the driver's seat. Encouraging honest and open discussions during retrospectives helps build trust among team members and fosters a collaborative mindset. By continuing to work on processes and behaviors, you and your team can improve your performance over time and make your working life better.

5. Use Collaboration Tools

The right tools can make a big difference in team collaboration. The best tools provide a reliable source of truth that the whole team can access, in a place where the whole team will access it. It's a simple concept; a shared understanding of the work is supported by shared and willing access to the same information.

Choose a tool that makes it easy for you and your team to access information and keep it updated. If you're already working in Jira, an integration like Easy Agile TeamRhythm provides a better view of your work in a story map format, with goals, objectives, and team commitment all made clear. Team retrospective boards are attached to each sprint (or spun up as required for Kanban teams) so you have your team-led ideas for improvement tightly connected to the work in Jira.

No matter which tool you choose, make sure it will facilitate better alignment, streamline your workflows, and provide a clear picture of roadblocks and progress. By using collaboration tools effectively, your team stays organized, focused, and connected, no matter where each member is located.

6. Build a Positive Team Culture

It may sound obvious, but a positive team culture is essential for effective collaboration. Creating an environment where team members feel valued, respected, and motivated, encourages the psychological safety they need to share their great ideas, learn from missteps, and collaborate more effectively with their colleagues.

High-performing teams recognize the achievements of others, share constructive feedback, and support practices that lead to a healthy work-life balance. Make it regular, and keep it authentic. A positive culture not only improves team dynamics but also boosts overall productivity and job satisfaction.

Successful Team Collaboration

Effective collaboration can be the difference between your team achieving their goals, or falling short. By embracing agile practices like the regular communication that comes from agile planning meetings, to the learnings that come from taking an interactive approach to development, and creating time for team-led improvement with retrospectives, you can seriously boost your team dynamics.

Easy Agile TeamRhythm Supports Team Collaboration

Easy Agile TeamRhythm is designed to make your agile practices more accessible and effective, helping your team plan, prioritize, and deliver work with better alignment and clarity.

Built around a story map for visualizing work and retrospective boards that encourage team-led improvement, TeamRhythm facilitates sprint and release planning, dependency management, backlog management, user story mapping, and retrospectives.

Tight integration with Jira makes Easy Agile TeamRhythm a reliable source of truth, no matter where you and your team members are located.

Watch a demo, learn about pricing, and try for yourself in our sandbox. Visit the Easy Agile TeamRhythm Features and Pricing page for more.

Easy Agile TeamRhythm

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Should you form cross-functional agile teams?

In large, conventional organizations, multiple departments manage specific functions. Marketing, finance, HR and sales teams work in silos, often focused on their own outcomes rather than being primarily driven by the customer and the market.

Yet even before the pandemic hit, organizations recognized the need to manage change and make decisions quicker than ever before to keep up with competitors. Along came covid, and those needs vastly intensified.

To thrive in an uncertain, complex, and ambiguous world, many organizations are moving away from silos and racing towards enterprise agility, forming networks of empowered cross-functional agile teams.

But the change from siloed departments to agile teams means change, and change can be difficult.

In this article we weigh up the pros and cons of each operating model.

Key points

• Communication, collaboration, and employee engagement are often better in cross-functional teams.
• By iteratively testing solutions quickly, cross-functional teams can boost productivity, cut costs, and deliver better results.
• There may be bumps along the road before a newly formed cross-functional team matures and reaches its potential, but you can take steps to help them succeed.

"The two most urgent reasons for adopting Agile are the speed and flexibility required by working environments that continue to be bother unpredictable and volatile." State of Agile Report

What are cross-functional agile teams?

Cross-functional agile teams (sometimes known as cross-functional scrum teams) are a key element in any organization’s agile development.

The team brings together people from across the business with different expertise and skillsets. Together, the team works toward a common goal.

Usually made up of 5 to 11 people, the team defines, builds, tests and delivers projects in sprints or iterations.

"The ability for the team to support each other, collaborate with each other and align to the goal are wonderful ways to measure agile."

William Rojas, Adaptavist

What are the benefits of cross-functional agile teams?

There are many benefits of having cross-functional agile teams in your organization. Here’s our top five.

1. Cross-functional teams communicate and collaborate better

Siloed teams can spend many hours a week in unproductive meetings as they negotiate resources and manage conflicting priorities. On the other hand, Agile teams align on goals and objectives from the beginning of each project. This helps make their subsequent meetings brief, productive and transparent. Each person is accountable and empowered to share progress and solve problems. As a result, agile teams are often more engaged and passionate about their work.

2. Cross-functional teams are responsive

In silos, each team is responsible for an aspect of a project with limited visibility into what other teams are doing. This can lead to blockers or conflicting priorities, creating rework and delays. They may also find they lack specific skills as the project goes on, leaving teams rushing to fill the gaps and causing further delays. Moving to agile teams means having the necessary skills and resources available, as well as identifying conflicting priorities and blockers early. This helps agile teams rapidly iterate, continually improve, and deliver results.

3. Cross-functional teams are innovative

In siloed organizations, employees can get caught up in their departmental group think. The limited exposure to other teams makes employees less likely to question established practises or suggest improvements. In cross-functional agile teams, perspectives from people across multiple teams are shared from the outset. Because people from different skills approach problems in different ways, this can lead to great ideas and business innovation.

4. Cross-functional teams help the business adapt to change

With their iterative approach and frequent communication, cross-functional agile teams can problem solve and change directions fast. They don’t face the renegotiation, reprioritization, and delays that can hold siloed teams back. Instead, businesses with cross-functional teams can better respond to changing market and customer needs.

5. Cross-functional teams consistently focus on the big picture

Cross-functional agile teams understand the ‘why’ behind the work they’re doing, and they come together with a focus on the customer experience. This shared focus dissolves the barriers between the different functions within the team. Deliverables are mapped to high-level business objectives which deliver greater value to the end-user.

What are the downsides of cross-functional agile teams?

If cross-functional teams are done right, there really are no downsides. What organization doesn’t want increased collaboration, innovation, customer focus and faster delivery?

That said, there can be bumps and conflict as people learn to adapt to the agile mindset – and this is where cross-functional teams can fail to deliver. Here are some of the common challenges large organizations face when moving to cross-functional agile teams:

• Cultural resistance with people reluctant to let go of the old way of doing things.
• No clear accountability, leaving teams unable to make quick decisions and people clinging to a sense of ownership over their work.
• Lack of alignment with goals which can lead to misunderstandings, rework, and potential conflict.

With this in mind, it may take a little time and support for a newly formed agile team to find its wings.

"Often the way teams become agile is just by doing it, trying it, and continuing to evolve and committing to that approach. So, if you haven't started - just get started. That's often the biggest struggle."

William Rojas, Adaptavist

The first step is to just get started

Being agile means changing an organization’s processes and people structure, and it can seem like a lot of hard work. But if businesses don’t transform so they can capture the productivity, speed, customer, and employee engagement benefits; they’re at risk of being left behind.

Cross-functional agile teams can be your key adapting fast and getting ahead. There’s no doubt they can deliver outstanding results – if you take the right steps to set them up for success.

For concrete advice on how to drive successful cross-functional agile teams and avoid failure, sign up for our free on-demand webinar - ‘Do’s and Don'ts of Agile Teams with Adaptavist’.

The webinar will take a deep dive into the SAFe agile team together with our partner and SAFe expert Adaptavist.

Keen to scale agile and form successful cross-functional teams?

Come along to a free, 40-minute on-demand webinar to find out how

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What is User Story Mapping? And more importantly, WHY would you want to run a story mapping session with your team?

Let’s start off by talking about the origins of User Story Mapping.

It’s now a common practice in agile software development, but it wasn’t always that way.

If you have experience with a Scrum or Kanban backlog, you've likely run into the dreaded flat backlog.

Why Story Mapping

In its simplest form, a flat product backlog is a laundry list of stuff 'to do' that will ultimately provide some form of value to your users/customers. At least we hope so.

Many of us have contributed to making these backlogs longer and longer, and they inevitably become overwhelming.

Regardless of whether the team pulls work from the backlog one-by-one or groups it into sprints, prioritizing work in a flat backlog comes with its challenges.

The flat backlog is a 2 dimensional view. It’s like a shopping list, which doesn’t provide context for the work.

Enter, the User Story Map! The concept of a User Story Map was born out of a desire to kill the flat backlog and create a more holistic, customer centric overview of our work.

A user story map is a visualisation of the journey a customer takes with a product, and includes the activities and tasks they would typically complete.

Usually conducted at the beginning of a Project, a user story mapping session is done with the sole purpose of creating a shared understanding amongst the team of who your customers are and how you should focus your time working on stories that provide the most value for them.

You can do this on a whiteboard with sticky notes, or you can do it in Jira using our app, Easy Agile TeamRhythm.

How to build a user story map

To create a visualisation of the journey a customer takes with a product, start by identifying each stage, and then list the activities and tasks the customer would typically complete for each.

Next, begin to associate each item of work in the backlog with its corresponding touchpoint in the customer journey.

At this point in a User Story Mapping session, a matrix should begin to emerge, containing a list of tasks or stories to which the team has committed to delivering, organized according to the steps in the customer journey.

From there, the map is divided into the time blocks the team uses to plan their work. For example, in sprint 1, the team might commit to 5 user stories, which are attached to 3 epics.

This helps build understanding of how progress will be made against larger pieces of work.

Why user story mapping is better than a flat backlog

Connecting the work in the backlog to the customer journey in this way begins to answer key questions like:

• WHY are we building this?
• WHO are we building this for?
• WHAT value will it provide them?
• WHEN do we expect to deliver this?

User story mapping essentially converts the 2D flat backlog in a three-dimensional view, because it gives us a way to say, “ok I’m currently working on building this user story, and I can visualise what piece of the customer journey this will be directly impacting AND we know when it will be delivered.”

Also, by putting the focus on the user, a story map ensures that the backlog contains work that add real value for the customer by helping them achieve their goals.

How to run a user story mapping session

Now that you have a better understanding of the value of a User Story Map, let's look at how to create one. First, you’ll need to set up a Story Mapping session with your team.

But whatever you do, don’t make it an open invite. This is really important, because if you don’t have the right people in the room then it won’t be effective.

People you could consider inviting are:

The product owner for the team

• a tech lead
• a user experience designer
• a marketing lead
• a data analyst and,
• someone from customer support

It’s also important to set some ground rules for the session.

There should be one person facilitating the session. A good practice is to involve a Product Manager from another team to run the session.

Depending on the scope of the story mapping session you may want to take a whole day or spread it out over a couple of days.

The scope all depends on how big your team is and how many user stories you need to add to your map.

There should be no phones or laptops out except for the facilitator.

Also, everyone in the room should be familiar with the user stories being discussed.

Now that you know the benefits of a user story map and what to consider when setting up the mapping session with your team, start thinking about who you can invite to participate in and facilitate the session.

What is a Scrum Master? The Scrum Master guides the daily Scrum in projects or software development to streamline processes as much as possible. This person applies agile methodologies to guide successful project outcomes.

If you want to become a Scrum Master, learn what defines this role. Explore its duties and how the servant leadership style supports carrying out the various responsibilities it involves.

Find out how the Scrum Master's role benefits product or project development. Finally, discover what qualifications you need to become a Scrum Master and what job types you can apply to complete your studies.

What is a Scrum Master’s role?

A Scrum Master's role is dynamic. They must be flexible and adapt to various circumstances, because the Scrum Master serves a vital role in managing projects.

Every product development project needs a different approach. The Scrum Master must adapt their approach to each position and even play the role of an agile coach at times.

Whatever role the Scrum Master takes on, they play a servant leader role (we’ll review what this is later). So, their responsibilities vary when guiding the team's progress.

Some ways that the Scrum Master works with team members and product owners include:

• Sprint planning with team members and product owners to check that everyone understands what needs to be done
• Solving issues such as work estimation, scope creep and over-committing to work volumes
• Holding daily standup meetings to discuss product issues, backlogs, and any other team member concerns
• Acting as a facilitator to limit blockers that hold the team back from completing iterations on time. The Scrum Master also handles any roadblocks by improving workflows
• Having sprint reviews that ensure team collaboration and helpful feedback
• Holding retrospectives to see how team members can improve
• Monitoring the Scrum board to ensure that all cards are current and that Jira and other software works properly
• Hosting individual meetings to get to know and help team members one-on-one
• Handling portfolio planning tools such as analyzing burndown charts. They use burndown charts and other tools as inputs into what the team needs to build and the cadence levels for their work.
• Making sure that the team members use agile guidelines in their projects. These guidelines help team members meet stakeholder needs.

At the end of the day, the Scrum Master champions the Scrum process for successful project outcomes.

Servant leadership

Part of answering the question, “What is a Scrum Master”? involves looking at leadership styles. These styles include bureaucratic, democratic, transactional, and many others. One style that fits well with the role of the Scrum Master is to be a servant leader, an approach that works well with small teams.

Servant leaders:

• Support a team spirit
• Share responsibility
• Share decision-making
• Focus on achievements instead of faults

Servant leaders find solutions which promote workflows and stakeholder satisfaction.

Scrum Master according to Scrum methodology

The Scrum Guide, written by Ken Schwaber, provides an excellent outline of the diverse responsibilities of the Scrum Master. Here are some of this person’s roles:

• Adopting the role of an agile coach to lead organizational transformation using the Scrum methodology
• Planning Scrum applications to help the organization understand how the new iterative workflow process works and adapt to changes
• Guiding leaders, managers, and other stakeholders in understanding the benefits and applications of the Scrum product development methodology
• Helping increase the Scrum team's productivity
• Collaborating with other organizational Scrum Masters within the organization to help team members adopt agile principles
• Promoting positive working relationships between team members, product owners, and other stakeholders
• Guiding sprint planning, daily stand-up meetings, sprint reviews, and product backlog items

Scrum Master challenges

While the Scrum Master supports a streamlined workflow, their job is not always as simple as it sounds. Here are some challenges they may encounter:

1. Change resistance

Scrum Masters’ concepts may be new to employees, so Scrum Masters can encounter resistance. Either way, the Scrum Master must create solutions to dealing with any resistance to change.

2. Lack of understanding

Not everyone will understand or even like agile processes. A good Scrum Master must overcome this and to help teams connect principles with practical implementation to assimilate agile practices.

3. Gaining leadership support

Scrum Masters can only do their work effectively if they have the full support of leadership. Scrum processes can be pretty challenging, which initially disrupts old processes, making transformation difficult.

Managers may be afraid that the Scrum Master will usurp their authority. Departments may not want to adapt their processes, but the Scrum Master must use agile coach techniques to overcome fears and unwillingness to adapt.

Unless the Scrum Master has the full buy-in of leadership, any change initiative will derail before it even starts.

How Scrum Master positions can work

Role rotation. Agile teams rotate the responsibility of this role between members. For example, each team member does admin tasks for each Scrum meeting.

Part-time role. The Scrum Master takes on additional responsibilities.

Full-time role. The Scrum Master takes on a dedicated, full-time role. They must have the experience to do this work and skillfully show the team how to apply agile practices.

Guiding many teams. A Scrum Master guides several development teams. They monitor the work progress for several teams.

Agile coach. This Scrum Master role involves coaching teams or other Scrum Masters.

If the Scrum Master role interests you, you should know that Scrum Master jobs are common, partly due to the popularity of the agile method.

Organizations often look for ways to improve product development. They want Scrum Masters to help guide the process to get products to the market quicker.

You can look on LinkedIn for positions for good Scrum Masters. Their research shows that these positions are in high demand, so you can improve your skills with Scrum Master certifications. Your prospects are diverse as you can work in manufacturing, health, government, education, and many others.

Scrum Masters can get a Certified Scrum Master (CSM) qualification. They can also be a Professional Scrum Master.

How to become a certified Scrum Master

Scrum.org offers various resources, including Scrum certifications and training. So, if you want to follow a career in agile methodologies and lead a Scrum team, you can become a CSM or a PSM. You can also opt to train through the Scrum Alliance, which has been operating since 2001.

Hundreds of thousands of Scrum Masters have attained qualifications through these organizations. Both provide recognizable certifications at various Scrum Master levels, so perhaps it's time to boost your career.

You can achieve a Professional Scrum Master (PSM) certificate from scrum.org. This is available at three different levels, including:

• The PSM I certificate. This certificate shows that students understand Scrum and its applications as per the Scrum Guide.
• The PSM II certificate is proof that you can apply the Scrum principles and practices in a complex real-work situation.
• PSM III certificate. This certificate shows that students have an in-depth understanding of Scrum Values and can apply Scrum principles and practices in complex environments and situations.

Anyone who wants to improve their career opportunities can sign up with Scrum Alliance to get their CSM certification. You can become a:

• Certified ScrumMaster (SCM). This certificate focuses on servant leaders and how to help the Scrum team work together to enact the Scrum framework.
• Certified Scrum Product Owner (CSPO). This certificate is for anyone involved in the business aspect of projects. If you want to know more about product development, productivity, and meeting stakeholder needs, this one is ideal.
• Certified Scrum Developer (CSD). This certificate is good when you want to know how to apply techniques and tools to build great software products. You will learn how to apply iterative Scrum methods in this certification process.
• The Certified Scrum Professional (CSP) learns how to improve Agile methodology implementation in each project they guide.

Take your career up a notch.

Easy Agile provides a range of resources to help Scrum Masters achieve their agile methodology goals. In addition, you can access resources such as our learning hub and webinars to improve your skills.

Scrum Masters can also explore Easy Agile Programs for Jira to enhance the software development team’s experience. Another excellent resource is Easy Agile Scrum Workflow for Jira.

Enhance your Scrum Master role with resources that make your work easier by overcoming resistance to new learning curves.

It's common knowledge in the world of digital marketing and eCommerce that personalization results in higher conversion rates, more engaged users, and a better overall brand experience for your customers. What's less common is personalization strategies based on purchase history, user behavior, and psychographic patterns identified across your customer base — these are known as user segmentation.

That's just a fancy way of saying that segmentation groups your customers by how they act, think, and feel. If you can identify these patterns, you can begin to anticipate your customers' needs and build personalized marketing campaigns and user flows.

Let’s say you added a first name to an email. That’s a beginning, but there’s a lot more to personalization strategies than using proper names. Developing deeper insights through segmentation allows for a hyper-targeted marketing strategy and more engaged users.

We'll dive into the weeds of user segmentation, give you some segmenting ideas, and show you how you can incorporate user segments into your Jira projects to help with your Sprint and release planning.

Product managers use Jira to plan based on user segments

If you're in product management, you're responsible for creating an organized product roadmap that aligns with the business goals for that time period. Visualizing the target audience represented in each sprint helps ensure you stay focused on the right functionality to meet your goals.

Often, user personas and customer journey maps are created before user segmenting gets underway. Rich personas and detailed journey maps not only provide valuable information to user experience teams, marketers, and product teams. They are the foundation for building different user segments.

Apply user segments to each stage of your customers' lifecycle, starting with their first contact with your brand, through purchase, onboarding, product usage, and eventually to churn. When personalized through a customer journey stage, marketing campaigns and product user flows enrich your customers' experience, ultimately increasing your profits and impressing your boss.

Lucky for you, Jira can help you do that. Here are some simple ways you can use Jira to organize work by user groups:

• Use labels and corresponding card colors identifying specific user segments.
• Add a custom field as a lifecycle or market segment(s) identifier.
• Create separate Jira projects based on segments.

Easy Agile User Story Maps and Personas are Jira add-ons. These Jira add-on apps are specifically designed to integrate Personas and Easy Agile User Story Maps into your Jira environment.

These tools allow Product Owners to better visualize and plan Sprints and releases with the appropriate balance of user stories for each customer segment. Create a persona for each segment within Jira and you can filter your Story Map by Persona.

User segmentation is as simple or complex as you make it

If you're at the “first name” stage of personalization, you've taken the first step toward building a personalized brand. But now, let’s get started on some basic user segmentation.

Before we get started, you need to understand two principles behind customer segmentation:

1. There is an infinite number of ways to segment your customer population. You'll need to do a lot of testing to figure out which segments return the best results for you.
2. A single customer can belong to multiple user segments. Nope, this isn't going to be a clean, one-to-one matching of customers and groups. But don't worry — we'll give you some tips on how to keep your segments organized.

Let's start by getting on the same page with what we mean by a segment. A user segment is a collection of users who have something in common. That's it.

Take a look at some typical methods of segmenting a user base:

• Geographic segmentation
  • Country, region, state, city, or neighborhood
• Demographic segmentation
  • Gender, age, race, religion, marital status, or family size
• Behavioral segmentation
  • Past purchases, preferred device (phone, tablet, or desktop), responses to marketing campaigns, or in-app feedback contributions
• Psychographic segmentation
  • Lifestyles, beliefs, value systems, interests, or opinions

As you can tell from this list, customer segmentation requires a significant amount of customer data. You probably have a lot of geographic and behavioral data already in your CRM or analytics tool.

Collecting demographic and psychographic data requires you to get more creative. While some customers readily offer this information, others are not so willing to disclose their personal details. Enticing those users through survey completion discounts, promising a more personalized experience, and analyzing social media interactions are a few ways to get a more complete demographic and psychographic disclosure from your user base.

Advanced user segmentation strategies

Basic segmentation is pretty straightforward. Once you've got that down, you'll want to move on to more advanced segmentation techniques to increase your targeting and results. This is where segmentation gets fun.

With advanced user segments, you begin to combine customer attributes across segments. For example, you may create a segment of users from Brooklyn Heights who own a specific product and typically purchase from their phone.

Let's take that example a step further. Suppose next, you create a segment of users from Brooklyn Heights who bought a specific product in the last 14 days, made their last two purchases from their phone, and have never responded to an email campaign. This segment seems like a prime candidate for an SMS campaign. Without segmentation, how would you know?

Another more advanced segmentation strategy if you have multiple products is combining product ownership, purchase history, and affinity data to create segments predicting the next purchase behavior.

An example of product affinity data would be customers who bought Product A also bought Product B 83% of the time.

Then, have your analytics team figure out the typical time lapse between the purchase of Product A and Product B.

Now, build your segments based on customers that bought Product A but have not yet purchased Product B. Your segments will include users that purchased A in the last 30 days, 31-60 days ago, and more than 60 days ago. (Your data will tell you the real numbers based on purchase history patterns within your customer base.)

These segments are ready for everything from targeted campaigns to customers most likely to purchase Product B. Trust us, your boss is gonna love this stuff!

We hope you're starting to see how to get more specific and include more attributes as your segmentation strategy gets more complex and more targeted. We recommend you start generally gradually add complexity to your user segments.

Because your segments are basically filters through which you view your customers, the more you segment, the smaller your population becomes. Customizing a campaign or user experience flow for a population of 50 when you have 5 million customers just doesn't make sense. Gradually adding complexity will let you know when you've gone too far and your population is too small.

Quick tip: Derived versus explicit data

When it comes to specific data attributes for your user segments, don't forget to think about derived versus implicit data. Derived data is presumed based on other explicit data.

Let us explain. Say you are building a music app and one of your user segments is jazz music fans. If a customer completes a form and tells you she loves jazz music, you explicitly know that she is a jazz music fan.

However, if a customer hasn't given you that information, but her music purchase history includes repeated purchases of songs from jazz musicians, you can derive that she is probably a jazz fan.

Think of derived data as a way to combine explicit data that allows you to make some actionable assumptions.

Release the power of segmentation through Jira

By now, you can probably see that user segmentation creates richer personalization experiences for your customers, which garners higher profits and better retention. And with Jira at the top of Gartner's list of agile planning tools, you might be able to use these tips on creating a user segmentation strategy with Jira.

Remember the steps to maximizing your customer and market segmentation strategies:

1. Create rich personas and detailed customer journey maps.
2. Use personas, journey maps, and internal user data to build meaningful customer segments.
3. Build personal marketing campaigns and user experiences for specific user segments.

In Jira, you can visualize, organize, and plan your product work with your user segments in mind. Combined with a roadmap app, Jira is a great tool that allows you to measure and report on the value delivered by each of your user segments.

At Easy Agile, we live by our name — making agile easy is our mission. Go ahead and check out our Jira apps: Easy Agile Personas, Easy Agile User Story Maps, and a flexible Easy Agile Roadmaps.

Ceremonies are regular events held by Scrum teams. ‘Agile’ is a broad word describing a different way of working with shorter, time-boxed cycles for releases.

Under the broad umbrella of agile, Scrum is one of the most popular approaches that teams use to organise their work and releases.

Each short iteration of work in Scrum is referred to as a sprint. A sprint is normally a 2 week period where the team focuses on a small slice of work.

The idea is that everyone focuses on 1 slice of work. And that slice is to be completed and shipped to the customer within that same sprint.

Scrum can be broken down into a few important elements:

1. Roles
2. Artifacts
3. Ceremonies

This post will focus on the Scrum Ceremonies.

All of the 4 Scrum ceremonies help ensure the Scrum team stay focused on the slice of work they agreed to focus on in that sprint.

It helps the team with transparency about progress on the work they committed to finish and to raise any issues early before they become blockers.

Let’s have a look at each of the four agile ceremonies in Scrum:

1. Stand up (or daily Scrum)

Goal of the stand up: a brief check-in where the team can raise issues or communicate with the whole team face to face.

Who joins the daily stand up: Developers, Scrum Master, Product Owner

Outcome of daily stand up: the team raises any blockers, but doesn’t have to solve them. Ensure each team member is clear about what they are working on. Each team member should be able to answer these three questions:

• What did I complete yesterday?
• What will I work on today?
• Am I blocked by anything?

When to hold a stand up: daily

Tip: stand ups can be done by business teams and don’t always have to be face-to-face. Here’s a photo of Australian bank ANZ’s executive stand up in action:

And another pic from InsideIT’s stand up:

2. Sprint Planning

Goal of sprint planning: sprint planning helps the team prepare for what work is coming up next. The team discusses each item of work which has been prioritised by the Product Owner.

Who does sprint planning: Developers, Product Owner, Scrum Master

Outcome of sprint planning: that everyone knows what the sprint goal is and how they are going to achieve it. Make sure everyone understands what’s the overall vision or objective of the work.

The team will be comfortable with what work is available to be picked up in the next sprint. The team will discuss any impediments or opportunities and how they can optimise the way the work will be completed.

The team will also estimate the work and draw a line when it is estimated that the effort to complete the work exceeds the team’s capacity or historical velocity.

When to hold sprint planning: at the end of a sprint or very beginning of a new sprint.

Bonus: sometimes in sprint planning you will find things you won’t do, and that’s valuable too.

3. Sprint review

Goal of the sprint review: showcase the work completed and receive feedback from the Product Owner and relevant stakeholders.

Who joins the sprint review: Executive Sponsors, Developers, Scrum Master, Product Owner

Outcome of the sprint review: each team member feels empowered by showcasing their work to the team. The team can celebrate their achievements. Executive team can ask questions. Product owner can provide feedback and check the work is of high quality and satisfies the user story. Works best with drinks and cake.

When to hold a sprint review: at the end of each sprint.

4. Retrospective

Goal of the retrospective: honest discussion about what worked well and didn’t work well. Encourage self-improvement and transparency.

Who joins the retrospective: Developers, Scrum Master, Product Owner

Outcome of a retrospective: receive feedback from the team and seek to improve in the following sprint. The beauty of agile and Scrum is the fast feedback loop.

If something isn’t working well, it only hurts the team for a maximum of 2 weeks. It can then be addressed at the retrospective and action can be taken to address the issue before it gets out of hand.

The outcome should be a commitment from the team to focus on addressing areas that need improvement or continuing behaviours that benefit team health and/or velocity.

When to hold a retrospective: at the beginning of a new sprint, reflecting on a sprint that has just ended.

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The common theme across these Scrum ceremonies is that they encourage team collaboration, transparency and communication.

In my experience, this is what truly makes agile a better way of working.

It’s not the story points or even the way the backlog is prioritised that makes a difference. The true game-changer of agile is that it helps teams with open and honest communication.

These agile/Scrum ceremonies won’t always work the same for every team.

However, they are a great way to facilitate conversation and encourage continuous improvement.

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.

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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.