Jeff Patton

Jeff Patton is is an independent consultant, teacher, and Agile coach and author of the book User Story Mapping.

Jeff makes use of over 20 years of product design and development experience to help companies create great products. Jeff started in software development in the early 90s as a project leader and senior developer for a small software product company. There he learned that well written code, and fast delivery isn’t the secret to success, it’s just table stakes. It’s actually deep understanding of your customers and users coupled with a desire to create a product that’s really valuable to them that makes the biggest difference.

In 2000 Jeff worked as a product manager at one of the first companies adopting Extreme Programming. It was there he built a strong appreciation for the discipline that Agile thinking brings to software development and a deep concern for what seemed to be left out, specifically good product thinking. Since then Jeff has been an evangelist championing the inclusion of strong product design and user experience practice in Agile development. Today Jeff teaches and coaches a contemporary blend of practice that incorporates Lean and Lean Startup and Design Thinking all directed at helping organisations build products their customers love. Jeff is a Certified Scrum Trainer, and winner of the Agile Alliance’s 2007 Gordon Pask Award for contributions to Agile Development. Jeff is author of the O’Reilly book User Story Mapping which describes a simple holistic approach to using stories in Agile development without losing site of the big picture.

Clearleft says

Jeff spoke at an early UX London, and we’re almost embarrassed it’s taken us so long to bring him back. We’re huge fans of his Story Mapping process and use it all the time at Clearleft towers, so couldn’t wait to dive into his new book. If you’re a designer struggling to fit traditional UX thinking into an agile process, this is the workshop for you.

Workshop: Using Story Mapping to Bridge the Agile UX Gap

Being a UX person on an Agile project can really suck, and for lots of reasons. While the UX people work hard to think holistically about their users’ product experience, Agile developers are working hard to break things down into tiny buildable parts. User Story Mapping is a simple UX-centric approach for understanding your product or feature idea from a whole UX perspective while still breaking down the product into small backlog items.

In this workshop you’ll learn how to build maps to understand how users work today and to identify opportunities for improvement. You’ll learn how to build maps to describe feature ideas and explore strategies for incremental release, and iterative and incremental development. You’ll learn more about the Agile product design and development lifecycle and where story mapping fits into it.

Workshop Outline:

Mapping essentials

  • Elements of a story map
  • The lifecycle of a story map
  • Simple models and shared understanding

Story mapping planning strategies

  • Finding minimal viable releases
  • Identifying product experiments
  • Creating a risk-reducing development strategy

Story Map to delivery

  • Story flow from opportunity through delivery
  • The UX role in the Agile product development lifecycle