What is an Agile Story Map?

Agile Story Mapping is a way of organizing user stories along two independent dimensions. These two dimensions can vary based on which type of story map works best for your organization. Typically the priority of capabilities is horizontally displayed on the top. Under each capability are smaller related user stories. This technique aligns user stories to capabilities and is a good organization technique when many user stories are planned.

Although Agile Story Maps can be created in many different ways, it is often easier to think of Agile Story Maps as a high-level representation of your product's customer's journey. While it's not a customer journey map, it does provide the big points a customer goes through when interacting with your product. You can also think of Agile Story Maps as similar to functional decomposition diagrams.

Suppose you are developing a grocery store application. In that case, the top line of the story map might indicate "Search for Item," "View Item," "Choose Item for Purchase," "Choose Delivery Options for Item," or "Add Item to Cart." The items under each of these headers would be more detailed. Under "View Item," you might have several categories such as "view on sales items," "view dairy items," "view item pictures," or "view customer ratings."

The Agile Story Board helps define the dependencies and sequencing of user stories. A common failure point is deploying unusable stories or being unable to deploy a user story entirely because components in other user stories are needed first. You can't wash a car unless you have a car to wash. You can't build a house unless the foundation to build up from.

The Agile Vision Board and Product Roadmap can be used as inputs into creating an Agile Story Board. The Agile Story Board can also be referred to as a User Story Map.

The Agile Story Map can be utilized by the Product Owner and/or Business Analyst in creating the product backlog. Agile Story maps help make the product backlog easier to read and see dependencies between user stories. They are used to tell a story. Every story has a beginning, middle, and end.

The Agile Story Map evolves as market, customer, and stakeholder expectations and priorities change. The Agile Story Map is a great organizational tool for handling user story changes.