User story mapping gives you a visual aid during product planning, which leads you to a new way of design-thinking. It connects a dev-team with non-technical members and lets you dig out all the vital information from stakeholders’ brains. User story mapping's intuitive layout gives you a powerful overview of the product.

During this course you'll learn the essentials of user story mapping. The sections are based on the six main steps of user story mapping. All sections contain a short, theoretical description and some intuitive examples for a better understanding. In addition there are hints and examples included which could be useful to master your story mapping skills.

To build your own story map and open public story maps, I suggest you sign up for StoriesOnBoard. During the 14-day free trial you can finish the course in addition to receiving additional education materials.

The first section is about framing the problem and discovering the target audience. This is the baseline of all product development, so it's vital to focus on that.

In addition, you should know your user personas and create a persona card – it's super-helpful in the further steps and along the whole product design process. Understanding the user personas delivers the right solutions for their pains or needs.

The second section will summarize the main steps of creating the product backbone. The product backbone contains the goals of previously described users and the user steps in a narrative flow. Knowing user goals leads to the main sequences of the product.

When a crucial step is missing at the beginning of a product design, it leads to subsequent failures, e.g.: missing features. So mapping the narrative flow lets you avoid missing part of the user journey.

After building the product backbone, it's time to learn how to collect the so called user stories in the third part. This section is not just about how to write a user story but it teaches you several methods to improve teamwork during the ideation phase, such as brainstorming methods.

To write effective stories you'll get hints for writing an intuitive user story and an effective description.

The final part of the course is the release planning. If you know which items are the most important to launch the product, this section will guide you on how to slice the product into versions or releases.