User Story Mapping

Don’t Prioritize Features—Prioritize Outcomes

because, remember, your job isn’t to build software, it’s to change the world

Talk about what’s going on outside the software

How else could users accomplish this? How do they meet their needs today?

Talk about what goes wrong

Talk about questions and assumptions

stumbled across something you don’t know. Identify your questions and discuss how important they are to get answered before you build software. Decide who’ll do the legwork to get those questions answered, and bring them back to your next conversation.

help them understand how the pieces you’ve just built fit into the bigger plan. Do this in a stakeholder product review.

The only thing that trumps an executive opinion is a cold, hard fact.

Stakeholder Product Review Recipe