Example Mapping Template
Create a shared understanding of a new product feature.
Trusted by 65M+ users and leading companies
About the Example Mapping Template
Example mapping (or user story mapping) helps product managers and their teams quickly break down product backlogs. Ideally, example maps help a cross-functional team (for instance, a product owner, tester, and developer) build up a shared understanding and language for why product features need to be added or changed.
Team leads can offer strategic direction toward a cohesive digital transformation (or timely upgrade) so your team has the relevant technology to stay competitive.
What is example mapping?
An example mapping session is a great way to develop structured, concrete user stories. Each example uncovered can help teams explore problem areas for customers and decide on acceptable criteria to build a new feature.
There are a few key elements that an example mapping tool can delineate:
Rules that sum up examples or agree on the scope of the user story
Questions or assumptions about situations where no one knows the ideal outcome
New stories that should be discovered or left out of the final scope
Example mapping also relies on a color-coded system to shape the scope of a user story:
Yellow sticky notes are for defining stories, such as “change of delivery address”
Blue sticky notes are for defining rules, such as “ETA is updated”
Green sticky notes are for defining examples, like “New address is out of range”
Red sticky notes are for questions, like “what if the customer lives outside the free shipping zone?”
This color-coded system helps steer the conversation in the right direction and keep the discussion on track. You can use a blank example mapping template to quickly and easily begin filling in the relevant fields to get the conversation started.
When to use example mapping
Example mapping is a collaborative method that can help your team define what accepted user behavior looks like for different scenarios. An example mapping tool can be a useful way to align your cross-functional teams toward:
Empathy for the customer and the team. Everyone should understand why new product features are needed, and what the customer may be struggling with as far as conflicts between stories and rules.
Shared understanding of the industry or product. By the end of the example mapping session, the team should leave with a shared language and appreciation for what’s at stake.
Small yet impactful potential for change. Think big and act small as a team. How soon can each recorded user story be translated into a real feature?
Rules and examples that follow logic. Specific rules and scenarios should back up every user story.
Create your own example map
Making your own example map is easy with Miro's template. Get started by adding the example mapping template to a new board, then take the following steps to make one of your own.
Understand the problem. Ask your product owner to define the user problem on a yellow sticky note, then explain how this translates to a need for a change in the product features. This helps the team better understand the problem.
Challenge the problem by asking follow-up questions. Collect all your team’s questions on red sticky notes, starting with “What if...?” These questions will live under your user story (the yellow sticky note).
Figure out the rules. Find the rules in the answers to the questions on red sticky notes. Each rule is your acceptance criteria for new product features. Make sure that every new rule can stand on its own. Ideally, it shouldn't be confused with or too similar to another rule.
Describe situations with relevant examples. Green sticky notes are where you record and collect interesting potential cases or instances. Keep the discussion going, and engage your team’s critical thinking skills by checking if you’ve reached the boundaries of the rule of your examples, as well as considering what happens if the rule fails.
Identify outcomes, impacts, and success metrics. What do you hope to accomplish with a new product feature, and how does it contribute to your business objectives? Consider how you might track and test the success of each proposed feature – what behavior you’ll be looking for and measuring.
Turn your stories into action items. These stories can be turned into a development plan for a new feature or product. They can also form the basis of a minimum amount of features needed to be valuable to your customer.
What is an example mapping technique?
Example mapping is a collaborative process. Ideally you should gather your team and agree on the scope of your example mapping and which questions or assumptions should be discussed. Once these agreements have been defined, you can use an example mapping template to fill in the color-coded stickies and workshop together as a group.
Get started with this template right now.
Kanban Framework Template
Works best for:
Kanban Boards, Agile Methodology, Agile Workflows
Optimized processes, improved flow, and increased value for your customers — that’s what the Kanban method can help you achieve. Based on a set of lean principles and practices (and created in the 1950s by a Toyota Automotive employee), Kanban helps your team reduce waste, address numerous other issues, and collaborate on fixing them together. You can use our simple Kanban template to both closely monitor the progress of all work and to display work to yourself and cross-functional partners, so that the behind-the-scenes nature of software is revealed.
Balanced Scorecard Template
Works best for:
Operations, Strategic Planning, Project Planning
Balanced scorecards are useful tools for understanding business performance at a glance with regard to customers, employees, business processes, and financial progress. Learn more about BSCs and create your own using Miro’s Balanced Scorecard template.
Project Proposal Template
Works best for:
Project Management, Documentation, Project Planning
For any type of project, the Project Proposal template can be a crucial step toward clarifying the context, goals, and scope of a project to get stakeholder buy-in. A project proposal outlines what you want to accomplish, your goals, and how you plan to achieve them. Generally, a project proposal gives the reader some context on the project, explains why it is important, and lists the actions that you will take to complete it. Project proposals have myriad uses. Often, businesses use project proposals to get external buy-in from a donor or outside stakeholder. But many companies draw up project proposals for internal buy-in too.
Job Map Template
Works best for:
Design, Desk Research, Mapping
Want to truly understand your consumers’ mindset? Take a look at things from their perspective — by identifying the “jobs” they need to accomplish and exploring what would make them “hire” or “fire” a product or service like yours. Ideal for UX researchers, job mapping is a staged process that gives you that POV by breaking the “jobs” down step by step, so you can ultimately offer something unique, useful, and different from your competitors. This template makes it easy to create a detailed, comprehensive job map.
Objectives and Key Results (OKRs) Template
Works best for:
Leadership, Strategic Planning, Project Planning
Clarity, focus, and structure — those are the key ingredients to feeling confident in your company’s directions and decisions, and an OKR framework is designed to give them to you. Working on two main levels — strategic and operational — OKRs (short for objectives and key results) help an organization’s leaders determine the strategic objectives and define quarterly key results, which are then connected to initiatives. That’s how OKRs empower teams to focus on solving the most pressing organizational problems they face.
Communications Plan Template
Works best for:
Marketing, Project Management, Project Planning
You saw the opportunity. You developed the product. Now comes an important step: Find your audience and speak to them in a way that’s clear, memorable, and inspiring. You need a communications plan—a strategy for controlling your narrative at every stage of your business—and this template will help you create a good one. No need to build a new strategy every time you have something to communicate. Here, you can simplify the process, streamline your messaging, and empower you to communicate in ways that grow with your business.