What is Story Mapping?
A visual technique that arranges user stories along the customer journey and slices them into releasable horizontal layers.
Created by Jeff Patton, story mapping replaces flat backlogs with a two-dimensional view: the horizontal axis is the customer journey, the vertical axis is depth of functionality. The exercise forces the team to walk through the user's experience end-to-end before scoping a release, and produces natural release slices ('walking skeleton' first, polish later). It's the antidote to backlogs that prioritize features in isolation and end up shipping unusable combinations.
Related terms
The structured work of figuring out what to build by validating customer problems and solution assumptions before delivery.
The smallest version of a product that lets a team test a critical assumption with real customers, not the smallest version they can ship.
The process of ranking candidate features by value, effort, and confidence to decide what gets built next.
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