At the beginning of any product development, most of the time, you find yourself drowned with a numerous amount of features as a result of your brainstorm with your customers as well as the rest of the stakeholders.
And as you go and start breaking them down into high-level user stories, it becomes more difficult to have a clear vision of the different steps the product will undergo to achieve customer and user satisfaction.
That's where comes to play the infamous technique introduced by Jeff Paton that helps map out your user stories visually which could be compared to painting a big picture of the process the user you're designing the product for will go through the system and why.

1 - What is User Story Mapping?

User Story Mapping is a visual planning technique that describes the user journey the users of your product will experience within the system in the most delightful way.
It is characterized by noting detailed requirements from the perspective of different users in order to create a high utility and efficient product.
Usually, a group of 3 to 7 people is needed to carry out this activity :

• Product Owner
• UI/UX Designer
• Engineers
• And in case some domain knowledge is required, the stakeholders

Primarily, User Story Mapping relies on collecting user stories to convey requirements from users’ points of view.
It's a guide that emphasizes the steps and ensures a smooth flow in the development process of your product. The development team categorizes the user stories in order of priority.

2 - Why is Story Mapping so important?

Among the many aspects that proved to be useful with User Story Mapping :

• Create a shared understanding of the product within the team which prompts discussion given the visual two-dimensional format
• See the big picture of a system and how  all the interactions fit together
• Plan your product releases
• Identify unknowns and uncertainty in the functionalities to be developed
• Better emphasize the users' experience
• Forces your team to see the product from your users’ perspective
• Avoid having a flat (and boring) backlog for your product
• Prioritize work and focus on the most important features first
• Frequently deliver more values sooner to your customer

3 - How to map your user stories in 7 steps?

1. KYU (Knowing Your Users)
You’ll need to identify your users and develop a deep empathy for them. Different people will interact with your product differently and have different objectives.

2. Pointing out the tasks
The question here is, how will your users interact with your product? It is crucial to summarize the goals the users achieve by using the product from their point of view.
Write each task on a post-it. This is important so that post-its can be reordered to build a logical narrative in the next steps.

3. Narrate your story
From the first tasks to be completed to the last, rearrange them to describe the journey the user is taking through the system.
It is the backbone that shows the process from beginning to end, with all the high-level activities the user will complete while using your product. The backbone is critical because it gives your team the “why” and the context behind the journey.

4. Add more as the understanding grows
Merge all duplicates together, and think about all the spot holes, alternatives, and exceptions that hadn’t been considered before. You're now starting to create a richer picture of the system you're trying to build.

5. Assemble all your tasks by activity
Group all the tasks that are naturally completed together at the same time or work together to achieve a bigger goal into activities and epics.

6. Slice it up!
This step is crucial as it helps to identify the minimum actions needed to accomplish the goal of a journey.
There are different ways to slice your user stories. Naturally, you will want to define a business objective and put together all the features that cut through it horizontally from start to finish. Usually, the first span (also called MVP) should be the smallest set of user stories required to be useful to achieve that business objective of yours.
Continue to do so with each set of features and draw a line under each one of the those spans. That, we will call your release plan.

7. Add more, more details!
This is the part where you supply your tasks with more details including all the requirements, validation rules to consider, assets for the task to be completed. This is your chance to collaborate with the team and your stakeholders to define the most important rules or generally called acceptance criteria for each of your user stories.

...The story doesn't end here!
This was an overview of how you can start off using User Story Mapping in an Agile project to your advantage as it greatly helps build a shared understanding of your product and bridge the gaps between the members of your team : designers, developers, and business stakeholders.
A User Story Map, just like a product roadmap, doesn't need to be static. Teams can always update it with findings from research, estimations, and customer feedback from sprint reviews and product releases. The Story Map can be used as a visual roadmap of the planned and remaining work.
Finally, this exercise has its importance in making the team build a great empathy to the user they're developing the product which can only bring more value to the increment they are building. Story mapping is a tool to help product owners and their teams create customer value with an iterative & incremental approach and offers many opportunities to introspect and improve.