As a UX professional you've spent countless hours putting together a narrative, mapping activity spaces, sketching interaction frameworks, and pinpointing key experiences. Now it's time to translate all of that work into something a development team can work with. It's heartbreaking to watch all of that work get eroded away by a project manager trying to keep a team cranking out code.
Here are a few helpful ways to preserve your work, while getting the developers what they need to deliver on the work you’ve done.
First
Break down your key experiences into stories. You can think of stories as context scenarios if that helps. Depending on the experience you’re deconstructing, you may have 2-4 stories per experience – this is now a story map.
Second
Break down story maps into tasks or features. The number of tasks per story will vary with the complexity of each task. These features can be used to begin building responsible estimates of time and complexity.
Third
Place each experience on a grid, mapped to tasks. You can use this visualization to responsibly tackle the most useful key experience (that supports your MVP). I call this a task matrix.
Fourth
Now your project manager (maybe that is you) has an affective way to move stories and tasks through a delivery cycle.
Need help visualizing this? You can download a large version of this process here!
Photo by Saad Salim on Unsplash
