User Story Mapping

This exercise usually happens in a workshop, with the product owner, developers, and sometimes the end client around the same table (or the same Miro board). Its main job is to settle a concrete question: what goes into the MVP, and what gets pushed to a later version? Without this map, every stakeholder carries their own idea of scope, and disagreements surface mid-development, exactly when they're most expensive to fix.

The common mistake is turning the workshop into a plain feature list, without respecting the order of the user's journey. That defeats the main point of the method: seeing the product from the user's perspective, not the team's. A good sign the exercise worked: the MVP line sparks real debate, and that debate happens before development starts, not during it.