StoriesOnBoard

for delivering the right product right on time

Friday, January 2, 2015

We created StoriesOnBoard because we love user story mapping and we are extensively using it in our projects. By always making visible the entire scope it forces us to think global. It prevent us from loosing in unimportant details. I mean, how many times did you realize that someone in your team or your customer just stuck in finding the perfect solution to a … not so important problem. How many wasted hours, or even days… While there are many other tasks that are more important by far. That’s where the visualization of a story map can help a lot. But we had a huge problem: the amount of space needed. Simply we didn't have enough board and wall space at our office. Even when we tried to make bigger maps for real life projects, we faced another problem: rigidity. It may sound strange for an agile practice like user story mapping, so let me explain. From week to week as we were discovering the domain we found new tasks (user tasks as Jeff Patton calls them in his incredible article). Then: How do you insert a new task in the middle of the map? Shift all the others with all their subtasks. That didn't work for us. We just found out that ideas were dropped (or merged) just because we thought they didn't worth the effort of rearranging the board. That's why StoriesOnBoard was born.