A Story Mapping Workshop

Last Monday, I facilitated a workshop on Story Mapping at Agile Monday Nuremberg. I got some positive feedback on that workshop and thus, I will share the format and materials here for anybody interested.

Materials

• Slides for introduction (you can find my slides here)
• Flip chart paper or some other kind of wallpaper for every group
• 2-3 fine liner for every group
• Sticky notes

Execution

Keep the presentation short

1. Introduce Story Mapping in 5-10 minutes using just one or two slides.
2. Let people split into groups of at most five people per group and brainstorm what app they want to "build". (5 min)
3. Next, the groups will write the key activities for their app. (10 min)
4. After activities are written, every group thinks about the tasks needed for the activities. (10 min)
5. The next minutes will be used, to plan for a first release of the app. (5 min)
6. Let every group present their result, i.e. the app and the first planned release to the whole group. (3 min / group)

Duration: The whole exercise will take approximately 90 minutes, depending on the number of groups.

Three things, you should bear in mind as facilitator:

Participants working on tasks for their app

• Try to keep the introduction as short as possible. People will learn how to create the maps by doing it and speaking about the result to others.
• Set strict timeboxes, to help people focus on the current task.
• Encourage people, to try to explain their idea using their map inside their group, before they present it to the whole group. If they can explain it easily, this is a good indicator for a good Story Map.

Bottom Line

Some results of our Story Mapping workshop

The take home message of this workshop will be: Story Maps are a really simple tool and make it much easier to communicate to various kinds of stakeholders about your application and key goals.

Feel free to use this format and material for your workshops on Story Mapping. I would be grateful, if you leave comments or any other feedback and share your improvements on this.