Story Mapping Software For Jira Cloud and Jira Server

Start planning from scratch

• Three-level user story mapping for an effective product design

• Fast story writing featureslet you collect user stories tremendously easy

• Add unlimited details, attachments or comments to user stories

Create user personas

• Boost visuality and team's engagement with user personas

• Create a compelling BIO, add details for a better understanding

• Assign personas to epics and visualize user journeys

Hierarchy sync

• Integrate the user story map to JIRA project with just a few clicks

• The levels on the story map will be synchronized to epics and user stories

• Create versions on the story map, they are synchronized too

Always ready for the change

• It's super easy to insert new stories in the middle of the backlog

• Drag tasks between epics or releases with one movement

• Use it to present the project's status

Organize your short-term and long-term plans

• Schedule versions smoothly, arrange them by drag and drop

• Don't let the dev team's board overloaded, push user stories to JIRA version by version

• Preview what the next month or quarter look like

STEP 1 - Build the story map's backbone

User story mapping expends a lot of effort focusing on the end user, so you need to frame the problem and the user's goal(s).

What are the main requirements that need to be satisfied using the product?

Let's write down these goals in a narrative flow, if it's possible. For example, you're designing an online accommodation platform, where visitors can find, compare offers and book a room. Our user would find hotels, then she/he would choose one and book a room.

STEP 2 - Build the story map's backbone

Now we have the product backbone, let's find out how to solve some steps. You don't need to think in features, just write down the user stories – e.g. “as a visitor I'd like to land on a clear, easy-to-understand website”.

Try to write short/smart user stories from ideas, e.g. “basic landing page” or “responsive website”, etc.

All the online story mapping tools offer a description section, so you can add notes and useful thoughts to a card. Moreover it can be used when specifying user stories or tasks. If you didn't involve a brainstorming team previously, now you should definitely do so. Remember, the more participants, the more ideas. To keep the brainstorming team focused, you can restrict ideation to a single goal or step.

STEP 3 - Prioritize user stories on the story map

You didn't need to concentrate on priority in the previous step. Now you should evaluate user stories which deliver more value or which are easy to develop. Of course, you can use your own prioritization method, or discuss it with the stakeholders.

Express priority order on the story map, and place high priority cards above others.

Continuing with our example: “basic landing page” ranked higher than “responsive landing page” and “highlighting promotions” has the lowest priority.

STEP 4 - Slice the story map into JIRA versions

Prioritization gave you some guidance on where to start, but it's just a half-baked solution to schedule a dev process. You need to slice the backlog horizontally into versions. Frame the Minimum Viable Product by moving cards into the first version. Check completeness by retelling the narrative flow with the user stories.

For example: user enters the basic landing page -» search hotels by name -» filter offers by date -» rearrange results by price, etc... Can the user reach their goal? If the answer is yes, you don't need to add more items to the first release. The next step is to group user stories around working features and schedule the subsequent versions.

STEP 5 - Push user stories to Jira

As I mentioned previously, doing the story mapping online provides robust opportunities to integrate your story map to Jira. Top-level cards can be synced as epics, and user stories remain the same in Jira after setting up the integration.

According to the backlog size or the product need you can link goals to epics in mid-size projects and sync steps with epics in larger projects. In addition you can send the backlog release by release, so you can keep the JIRA project clean. Then you can break user stories into tasks in the issue tracker tool.