Have you struggled to split user stories into small but valuable chunks? Do you have problems prioritising stories or getting a commitment from business stakeholders on what they want to achieve? Do you have issues deciding when a story is done or how many other stories you really need to achieve a business objective? Are you managing large amounts of stories that are problematic to estimate, prioritise or plan for? If so, join this interactive workshop and bring your product owners and business sponsors to learn how to get the most out of user stories.

The participants of this interactive workshop learn about the basics of Impact Mapping, and try it out in practice on several realistic examples to understand the key facilitation techniques and learn how to run and apply Impact Mapping sessions in their organisations.

Impact Mapping is a strategic planning technique that helps organisations manage flexible roadmaps for iterative delivery, by clearly communicating assumptions, helping teams align their activities with overall business objectives and make better delivery decisions. Impact mapping can help you build products and deliver projects that make an impact, not just ship software.

Key learning points

• Fight a huge backlog with 500 crap stories
• Prioritise with multiple competing stakeholders
• Avoid a user story stream of consciousness and create a big picture for prioritisation
• Establish a good reporting structure on outcomes rather than just monitoring velocity and activity

• Get agreement from the whole team and the business sponsors about which user stories are useful and which are just noise
• Enable business sponsors to benefit from flexible scope and avoid water-scrum-fall
• Effectively prioritise based on value
• Avoid pet features
• Run impact mapping sessions