user-story-mapping-workshop

The user-story-mapping-workshop skill guides product managers through building a Jeff Patton-style user story map via adaptive questioning, solving the problem of flat backlogs where stories become "context-free mulch" disconnected from the overall system narrative. Instead of generating a backlog, it produces a two-dimensional visual communication framework that organizes work horizontally by user workflow and vertically by priority.

The skill explains the core structure: a backbone of activities across the top arranged in narrative order, user tasks descending by priority beneath each activity, and details or acceptance criteria at the bottom. It teaches key concepts including the walking skeleton (the highest-priority tasks forming the minimal viable end-to-end product), ribs (supporting tasks), and a left-to-right, top-to-bottom incremental build strategy. It asks up to five adaptive questions with three to four enumerated options each, gathering scope and personas first, and defers to a companion workshop-facilitation protocol for the one-question-at-a-time flow. A bundled template.md provides the facilitation agenda and outputs checklist.

It targets product managers and teams who need backbone activities, tasks, and release slices for a workflow, particularly when starting a new product or major feature, reframing an existing flat backlog, aligning stakeholders on scope, or planning an MVP and incremental releases. The skill explicitly notes it is overkill for single-feature projects, unnecessary when a backlog is already well-understood, and inappropriate for technical refactoring with no user workflow to map. It is a documentation package (SKILL.md plus template.md) with no executable code.