Essay · 20 min read

User Story Mapping

Jeff Patton · Jeff Patton & Associates Free Intermediate

Story mapping is the technique for laying out the user's journey left to right and slicing off the smallest first version, which is exactly the must have actions for version one problem our answer names. Patton's own writeup teaches you to tell the whole story of what the user does, then draw a line under the handful of steps that make version one. It is the antidote to a flat wishlist of features.

  • Lay out the user's journey as a left to right sequence of steps
  • Slice horizontally to find the smallest usable first release
  • The goal is shared understanding, not a longer feature list

The question it answers

  1. How do I write a spec for a developer when I'm not technical?

Read with it

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  5. This is the clearest statement of the exact idea in our answer: a spec describes how the product works entirely from the user's... Joel on Software Essay · 10 min read Painless Functional Specifications, Part 2: What's a Spec? Joel Spolsky
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