User Story Mapping is an excellent technique to visualize how the solution is going to be iteratively developed in fast-feedback cycles. MVPs can be defined for various reasons such as validating the need for certain functionality, gaining user feedback on design decisions, or investigating technical techniques. The story map will visually show how the team will iterative develop working solutions and evolve toward a MMP (minimum marketable product).
In my experience delivering high velocity, critical business projects, I have worked in environments that have traditional software development approaches as well as environments using agile development approaches. While Scrum has a Product Owner role, every organization is unique and hence their adaptation of roles when they are in an agile environment differs in how the business and IT interpret these roles. Lack of clarity of these roles often results in team members and stakeholders becoming frustrated as they constantly step on each other toes. Here are three key questions that differentiate between the following potential roles at scale that are involved in bringing product direction and building a viable backlog. These roles collectively can work together to help shape the backlog:
As a product owner, I am constantly challenged with writing user stories that meet my stakeholder needs. A key deliverable from a Product Owner is having user stories with crisp acceptance criteria. Having clear acceptance criteria enables the scrum team’s ability to deliver high-quality software. It also enables the team to make commitments toward sprint goals while ensuring that the business is getting high value deliverables based on the decomposition of the highest priority epics. The challenge in writing good user stories is always the amount of details to add to a user story. A good user story should have enough details to understand the business intent, the user roles, the goal and the depth so that the team can understand it to produce a workable prototype or software and the business can understand it.
