Bio

Trond is an IT architect and aspiring sociotechnical systems developer from the consulting firm Scienta and has many years experience with large, complex, and business critical systems, primarily as a developer and architect on middleware and backend systems. His main interest the last decade has been service-orientation, domain-driven design, event driven architectures, and sociotechnical systems, working in industries like telecom, media, TV, and public sector. Mantra: You have to become the business in order to design solutions that truly fit their needs.

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User story mapping for domain discovery (Hands-on Lab, Main Conference)
by Trond Hjorteland

(This is a hands-on lab with limited capacity. You should receive an invitation to sign up for your favourite session at latest one week before the conference. Capacity of this session = 28)

Are you in a company that is customer obsessed, striving to create solutions that focus on the user needs and desires? Maybe you even try to build those solutions together with the customer and their users, involving them in the actual design by building incrementally using mock-ups, pilots, and MVPs? Or, maybe you are not there yet, but want to be? Building stable and sustainable IT solutions in such a highly agile environment can seem impossible, right?

In this workshop, we will take a close look at a technique that came out of the agile community; user story mapping. The original application was to get control of the product backlog, making it explicitly connected with the user interaction and help discovering delivery slices that are viable for the user. Its applicability can also be extended to include other phases of the product delivery, all the way from the initial ideas and inception, creating coherent customer journeys, to the continuous enrichment and maintenance of the product after the initial deliveries. Story mapping is not only a tool for product discovery, but also domain modelling and product delivery, being a tool to cross the chasm between business and IT, i.e. the problem and solution domain.

We will create a map for a concrete product taken from the pay TV domain, trying to follow all the phases of the product discovery and learn the intricacies of the domain along the way. The user need is the main driver here, but will also be constrained by company strategies, IT legacy, organisational structure, and many other factors. We will also see how the map can be used to handle changes in requirements as well as explore how one can incrementally construct the product to shorten the essential feedback-loop.