Product Owner
Finally! Jira-powered
User Story Mapping on Whiteboards
Visualize your user’s experience by placing user stories along your customer journey and prioritizing them into sprint or version swimlanes.
Quickly add & update user stories in Jira without leaving your whiteboard.
Craft user steps from left to right along the user journey.
Create user stories for each step.
Prioritize them by dragging them up & down. Break stories into product releases or sprints.
Convert epics & stories into Jira issues (optionally).
Craft user steps from left to right along the user journey.
Create user stories for each step.
Prioritize them by dragging them up & down. Break stories into product releases or sprints.
Convert epics & stories into Jira issues (optionally).
Scrum Master
More Jira magic for story mapping?
Add or edit Jira stories without leaving your whiteboard.
Easy backlog prioritization. Drag items from backlog right inside your story map.
Quickly create subtasks.
Bulk edit Jira epics or user stories.
Create new or display existing dependencies between user stories.
Add or edit Jira stories without leaving your whiteboard.
Easy backlog prioritization. Drag items from backlog right inside your story map.
Quickly create subtasks.
Bulk edit Jira epics or user stories.
Create new or display existing dependencies between user stories.
Don’t lose track of your customers.
Each of your user stories should be written from the perspective of a particular user persona. Keep your personas handy on the sidelines and be able to quickly resort to the relevant characteristics of your user, their goals, problems, or behaviors.
Get team members to vote for the most valuable user stories.
Having difficulty while prioritizing user stories into version swimlanes? Just ask workshop participants to vote for the stories that, in their opinion, are the most important and then break them down into relevant release or version swimlanes.
Story Maps are better in context
Having difficulty while prioritizing user stories into version swimlanes? Just ask workshop participants to vote for the stories that, in their opinion, are the most important and then break them down into relevant release or version swimlanes.
Engage remote team members in user story map creation.
User Story Mapping is a collaborative process. Include stakeholders from multiple departments as well as your Product Manager, Product Designer, and Engineers. See what is happening during the session by following participant cursor movements and the stories they create.
Get started
with Story Mapping
on Whiteboards today
Whiteboards
Useful User Story
Mapping Features
Templates
Choose between 30+ ready-to-use templates from ice breakers to various agile ceremonies like User Story Mapping or Backlog Refinement.
Summon attention
Use moderator features and ask participants to follow your avatar as you move around the board to keep their focus.
Comments
Add your suggestions, ideas, or remarks in the form of a comment on the whiteboard to refer to it later or give feedback to your teammates. COMING SOON!
Bulk edit
Edit multiple Jira stories in one go. Assign, move to sprint or release, update status or any other issue attribute.
Diagrams
Use whiteboards to create any diagram, starting from architecture diagrams through UMLs to entity-relationship diagrams.
Copy & paste user stories from XLS
Copy a list of user stories from XLS and paste it onto the whiteboard. Each story will be pasted as a separate card.
Guest Access
Open up your whiteboard to external guest collaborators from outside of your company, like contractors or agencies.
Print User Story Map
Print out and distribute your user story map and keep everyone, well, on the same page.
Export map to PDF
Export your story map to a hi-res PDF and share it with stakeholders outside your team or embed it as part of the project documentation.
Project Manager
Communication & Collaboration
Why use User Story Mapping on
a whiteboard in roadmapping,
planning, or backlog refinement?
Don’t lose track of your user
Keep your user persona at the center of your product planning.
Prioritize from the user’s point of view
Build first what’s important for your user, not what’s important for you.
Tap into your team’s brain
Engage all team members in the process of user story map creation.
Flexible with your company
Support for on-site, remote, real-time & asynchronous collaboration.
One-stop shop for all your team activities
User Story Mapping FAQs – Definition, Benefits, and How to Create a User Story Map in Jira
1. What is user story mapping?
User story mapping helps visualize the steps your users take when using your product. It gives an opportunity to discuss the most needed features with your team, in order to create the ultimate user experience. User story mapping is essential in product development. If you plan to develop a new feature you have to make sure your customers actually need it and that’s when user story mapping comes into play.
User Story Mapping helps prioritize stories that are crucial for your users in the context of their journeys. User story mapping is a much-needed planning technique that consists of goals, tasks, and activities ordered in chronological order and covers the whole product development workflow. It helps stakeholders address the most critical features first and look at the product backlog items from the customer’s perspective.
2. What are the benefits of story mapping?
Prioritization
User story mapping helps with the prioritization of the tasks, making sure the most critical features and bug fixes are implemented first in the upcoming sprints.
Collaboration
Story mapping boosts collaboration and open discussion within teams. It helps to get a common understanding, brainstorm the individual steps, and outline all the activities performed by the user.
Knowledge sharing
It gives an opportunity to exchange valuable knowledge, particularly between the design team, software developers, and stakeholders.
Transparency
User story mapping gets everyone on the same page with a concise overview of upcoming product features and corresponding releases.
Stakeholder management
It helps facilitate communication with stakeholders, creating more productive discussions focused on clear and defined product goals.
Customer-centered approach
User story mapping lets the team look at the issues from the customer’s perspective which helps prioritize the most needed features that create a friendly user experience.
Risks and dependencies
User story maps help identify potential risks and dependencies that can in turn have an impact on the upcoming release schedule.
3. What is user story mapping in Agile?
User story mapping is often practiced by agile teams, where sticky notes represent specific activities users complete when they interact with a digital product. The main goal of agile methodology is to release working iterations of the software regularly to the users. User story mapping can help with shorter release cycles, providing a continuous feedback loop to the development team that optimizes the user journey. User story maps in agile help define what to build next, how to prioritize the product backlog, and how to define the scope of the following sprints.
Story mapping in agile encourages ongoing discussions in teams, about user needs, blockers, solutions, bugs, and fixes. User story maps in agile are a lightweight alternative to complex documentation and lengthy product requirements usually present in the waterfall approach. Story mapping is flexible, adaptable to changing requirements, transparent, and due to its visual nature – easily understood by management, development, and product teams.
4. How to do user story mapping?
User story mapping is usually done during a productive brainstorming session. It starts with setting goals your users want to achieve and creating corresponding user stories.
STEP 1 Focus on User Goals
Define the goals your users want to achieve when using your product. Let’s say you run a website where users can browse profiles of the local restaurants, check menus, and opening hours as well as leave reviews. Write each goal your user wants to accomplish on a separate sticky note and arrange them in logical order.
STEP 2 Map the User Journey
Go back to the beginning of the user journey and brainstorm what activities need to be performed by the user in order to complete specific goals. For example, if the user would like to leave a review for a particular restaurant, he needs to be logged into his account first. Place all these steps underneath specific goals on your user story map in a separate swimlane. This activity can help you spot any missing steps in the user journey, if this happens simply add additional user goals that act as an umbrella for all the specific user activities.
STEP 3 Think of solutions
In this step, you can focus on solutions that will enable the users to complete the activities that will eventually make them accomplish a specific goal. Now it’s the time to create user stories, following an example as a [user], I’d like [what], in order to [why?]. User story example, “As a user, I want to create an account to be able to leave a review”. Place the solutions on the sticky notes, next to the corresponding user activities.
STEP 4 Prioritize and delete duplicates
Once the story map is done, analyze it to identify possible duplicates and rearrange the user stories based on their priority, urgency, and value for the end customer.
STEP 5 Assign user stories to sprints
Group user stories into sprints, outlining a clear scope and assigning a realistic deadline. Start with smaller tasks that do not require a massive capacity from your development team first to find your team’s unique flow. Estimate user stories with story points to predict and communicate to the stakeholders when they can expect the next release.
5. How to create a user story map in Jira?
You can create a user story map using paper or digital sticky notes, however, online tools for creating user story mapping in Jira are much more flexible. With virtual boards like Whiteboards.io, you can easily edit the sticky note, rearrange the goals and corresponding stories with just one click and convert the sticky notes to Jira issues in bulk. The physical whiteboards are much more limiting as you would need to transfer all the user stories to Jira manually, which usually is a lot more time-consuming.
If you’d like to create a user story map in Jira, create your user story map on a digital whiteboard first, to have a visual representation of the user journey. Feel free to use ready-made user story mapping templates to get a head start and get inspiration from the already laid out plan. When searching for digital whiteboards, pick one that has native integration with Jira. Native Jira integration will let you easily convert sticky notes to Jira issues, straight on your online whiteboard, without the manual copy-pasting and switching between the apps.
Whiteboards