Is your agile team stuck on stories? Overly dependent on the standard “As a user, I want to … so that …”? User stories and product backlogs are useful tools, but they are not the only means to explore product needs—and in some cases, they are not the most effective! 

In this tutorial you reach beyond user stories, weaving visual thinking through your agile business analysis work. Visual thinking and business analysis are a natural duo with many comparable skills: creativity to conceive something new; analysis to explore, evaluate, and confirm; and willingness to give and receive feedback. You experience how sketches, models, diagrams, and pictures serve to externalize thinking while helping jump-start and anchor agile product conversations. You also learn how to “agilize” industry-standard business analysis tools and techniques, such as context diagrams, data models, prototypes, and more. Visual models and user stories are not only complementary, but also mutually beneficial, informing and confirming each other.

Join Mary Gorman, co-author of Discover to Deliver: Agile Product Planning and Analysis, for a highly interactive session that blends individual, small group, and whole group activities. (Bring your own product to use in the exercises, or work with one provided.) Leave with tools and techniques to powerfully engage and energize your stakeholders and help your team speed the way to better user stories.

Learning Objectives:

• Understand when and how to use visual thinking to identify and describe user stories
• Explain the risks of over-reliance on user stories
• Describe how visual business analysis fosters collaboration
• Sample a variety of visual analysis tools that stimulate exploration, including Design Thinking and Structured Conversations
• Make the case for using visualization to speed your agile product discovery