User Story Mapping by Jeff Patton

I have to admit I was a bit sceptical going into this book. It seemed to promise a lot with a simple premise and one, frankly, that made solutions to a lot of my product problems way simpler.

So, I was reading with a bit of scepticism and pleasantly surprised.

And yet still, despite the fact I think it does sort of approach storymapping from a very ideal direction, and doesn’t get into the weeds of what happens on complex projects or how to untangle a bigger and more problematic project, it does make a clear and compelling case for storymapping helping with the What of needs to be delivered often where quite often the problem is developers using Agile techniques and getting lost in the trees and quagmired in the How of implementing something.

Effectively, storymapping ends up being a value roadmap about what’s important, what needs to be delivered together, and how to chunk out what gets delivered as value, and most importantly, the hard decisions about what doesn’t get delivered. As the author himself says, there is always too much software to deliver and too little time and money.

SO, overall, I’d have to say I really liked the book. While I do believe it starts to drag after a while and itself gets lost in the weeds discussing how to deliver with Agile and Lean (which I’m assuming most people would be familiar with if reading the book), it’s still a pretty seminal work I’d say and one I’d be adding to the bookshelf at Neo for key things to read on UX and our process.