Why we made ProductGo
Prioritizing user stories in Jira's flat backlog proved challenging as we lacked clarity on the highest-value features and an understanding of our target users' needs. To gain a holistic perspective of our product, we turned to user story mapping after being inspired by Jeff Patton's book.
While we explored existing tools and plugins within the Atlassian Marketplace, none met our requirements. As a result, we decided to develop our own integrated solution within Jira, called ProductGo - Agile User Story Maps, Roadmaps & Persona for Jira. The positive feedback during the beta phase motivated us to invest more time and effort into refining and completing the tool.
How Story Map Works
The story map's backbone consists of essential steps for users to achieve their goals. These steps form a narrative of the user's journey. Each step includes multiple user stories that can be taken to accomplish the step, depending on the user and their context.
The story map contains four components:
Goals: The actions that users take to reach their larger goals have a goal level that’s tied to user behavior.
Steps: Lower level under Goal, create the backbone of the map by telling the story or narrative of the user’s journey.
Stories: Basic building blocks of a map that describe something you can deliver and evaluate.
Releases: Swimlanes split the story map horizontally to show what is in and out of each release.
Benefits of using Story Map
Here are a few benefits of using a story map as a user story tool:
Manage backlog with an overview and level structure.
Brainstorm, discuss, and prioritize user needs in a collaborative approach.
Manage activities and tasks, and divide them into epics or user stories systematically.
Arrangement and prioritization of user activities and user tasks, or drill down to refine them into related epics or user stories.
Collaboratively manage user stories online, ensuring alignment and clarity for remote and co-located teams.
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