When facilitating a story mapping session, I’ve found using acceptance criteria at each level of the story map (user goals, activity, user-tasks, epics and stories) every useful to flush out the next level.
Let’s assume we are building a platform for adventure sports enthusiasts.
For one of our personas, Julian (technology savvy, software engineer with a large MNC and in his 20’s): one of his activity would be “to find unique adventure sport close-by within his budget”.
To be able to achieve this activity, what would Julian have to do? How would we know Julian was actually able to achieve this activity? These questions would help us flush out the user-tasks under that activity. Similarly, once we have the user-tasks, then we would be able to look for acceptance criteria at each user-task level to flush out the epics.
I’m curious to know what other techniques have you used to flush out the story map?