User Story Mapping

Purpose

Visualize the user journey by creating a hierarchical map that breaks down high-level activities into steps and tasks, organized left-to-right as a narrative flow. Use this to build shared understanding across product, design, and engineering, prioritize features based on user workflows, and identify gaps or opportunities in the user experience.

This is not a backlog, it's a strategic artifact that shows how users accomplish their goals, which then informs what to build.

Input

Works best with: The product or user workflow being mapped. Also useful: The primary user, the end-to-end narrative as you understand it, existing backlog items to place, and release goals.

Anything supplied with the invocation itself, text after the skill name, a pasted context dump, or an appended ARGUMENTS: line, counts as answers already given. Use it and skip whatever it covers; don't re-ask.

Arriving empty-handed? That works too. The skill asks whose journey you're mapping and what they're trying to get done, then builds backbone → tasks → slices.

Example invocation: Story map for our expense-reporting flow, from receipt capture to reimbursement, with an MVP slice for the pilot.

Key Concepts

The Jeff Patton Story Mapping Framework

Invented by Jeff Patton, story mapping organizes work into a 2D structure:

Horizontal axis (left-to-right): User journey over time

• Backbone: High-level activities the user performs
• Steps: Specific actions within each activity
• Tasks: Detailed work required to complete each step

Vertical axis (top-to-bottom): Priority and releases

• Top rows: Essential tasks (MVP / Release 1)
• Lower rows: Nice-to-have tasks (Future releases)

Story Map Structure