What's Your Skateboard?

User Story Mapping is a strategy where you form a team of customers, developers, and users around your project to discover the full details of your project. Your team diagrams the story of the business process and all of the events happening around it. Once you have completed discovery of these stories, your team uses strategies to view features alongside the problems they solve. It is a powerful approach that allows your team to prioritize features, based on everyone's needs and motivations. Instead of planning our project as a building that we must build with a strong foundation, we learn to plan as if it were a vehicle. This focus delivers the Most Valuable Features to the customer by answering the question, “What’s Your Skateboard?”

In this talk, we will use some simple examples to diagram the process, discover the details of the project, and finally to identify the main objectives of the project. Through examples, we will discuss strategies for prioritizing features. Finally, we will talk about how to handle areas of risk in the story.

You will quickly see how this strategy helps you to communicate more clearly with your customers, and how it can help you all evaluate priorities based on everyone's needs. Opening communication with your customer in this way, helps to reduce frustration with unmet expectations and confusion about project deliverables, as well as improves estimation.

Participants in this talk will get an overview of the following:

- Building the story map, and using the map to find out more about the project.
- Grouping the stories based on objectives and problems solved
- Prioritizing features that deliver the most value to your customers
- Identifying risk in the story map and strategies to deal with it

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