On a recent Agile Mentors podcast, I turned the tables on host Brian Milliner and I interviewed him about a resource he created for our community called
the definitive guide to the what and when of product owner responsibilities.
The link to download the free PDF guide should be appearing just above my head as I speak, and it's also in the description.
In this video, i want to share a moment from that interview with you.
We'll start at the moment when I asked Brian to tell me more about one of the quarterly activities he recommends for product owners,
creating a story map.
I want to ask you about the story maps for a second.
What's your guideline?
Because somebody asked me this recently.
I'm curious on your answer.
What is your guide line for when we should create a StoryMap?
Do you always, only at the start, or in the middle?
What your advice?
Creating it, I always created at start.
And again, this is my experience, right?
But what I have found to be useful is to do it at beginning.
It's sort of right in that order.
Right?
I've done the vision.
Figure out who my users are.
Then I want to know what the...
the general big picture is for my product.
I want to be able to step back from a 50,000 foot view and say, all right, here's kind of the step-by-step of what we're going to doing.
Because kind like a product backlog, it's a living, breathing document.
It's not done, we do it once at the beginning of our product and then it is done set forever.
It's constantly adapting and changing as we add new feature areas, as understand differently how our users would interact with the product.
We're going to adjust and change it.
I want it to always reflect reality.
Let's talk about reality there.
But what I see is story maps that are hard to keep up to date.
Are you seeing teams that really succeed at keeping them up to date all the time?
I know the living breathing thing for like a couple months and then it's like the dusty old story.
Yeah.
Well, this is kind of one of the things where it was kind hard for me to put this in a time frame because there's really two time frames that I would like
this to appear in.
Yes, I do think we should do it before the first sprint.
And by the way, again, there I would do this in multiple rounds with different sets of stakeholders.
But then once it's established, kind of would slide that into that quarterly kind.
Of activity to say we may not touch it every quarter, but every.
Quarter I.
Would want to check in on it and just say is this still accurate?
Do we need to adjust it?
We need.
To do anything different about it.
What about you?
Do you create story maps?
When?
How do you ensure they aren't just buried eight deep in some file folder?
Let me know in the comments.
Remember too, you can download the free, the definitive guide to the what and when of product and responsibilities from our site.