This Storymap version evolved throughout hundreds of teams using it at Digital Product School Munich.
It's a shared artifact for two different jobs at once. Traditional agile setups treat discovery (understanding user problems) and delivery (building the backlog) as separate exercises with separate tools — research docs here, Jira there. The DPS Storymap puts them on the same board: the persona's journey runs across the top as a horizontal spine, and everything else — ideas, backlog items, pain points, technical constraints — gets mapped underneath in swim lanes against that spine.
The persona-journey backbone forces concreteness before prioritization. The instructions ask teams to pick a persona and define a goal this user has, then create the steps your persona has to take in the yellow lane, written very detailed... it should read like a movie script. That level of specificity matters — vague steps produce vague backlogs. Because every subsequent lane (ideas, risks, tech notes, whatever the team adds) is mapped against these concrete steps, prioritization decisions are always anchored to an actual moment in a user's experience rather than floating in the abstract.
It can be altered by adding/changing lanes and will help product teams exploring ideas and executing their vision.
We consider it being the missing link between exploration and execution.
It became very handy for both Design Sprints and Agile Planning sessions. Feel free to reach out to us for suggestions.
Instructions:
Pick a persona and define a goal this user has.
Create the steps your persona has to take in the yellow lane. Keep it very detailed, it should read like a movie script.
Add chapters for easier navigation.
Map whatever you feel against those steps using any of the other lanes or create your own ones.
Watch this User Story Mapping video by Digital Product School for more info.
Here you can find some background info on how and why this template was created.
