Example data. Fieldnote is a fictional company used to fill all 61 boards, so the examples tell one consistent story.
Post-PMF, the whole Field app squad maps Léa's day to slice the offline mode into three releases.
What the team took away
Release 1 covers the full walking skeleton of Léa's day except the signature: she can log every job offline within four weeks, the polish comes after.
How to run it
Preparation
Invite the whole delivery team plus one person who talks to users every week (support, sales, research). Eight people max.
Send the persona and the goal of the product in one paragraph the day before. The map starts from a user, not from a feature list.
Prepare the board with an empty backbone row at the top and three horizontal release lines below it. Stack blank stickies in two colors: one for activities, one for stories.
Agenda
15 min
Tell the story One person narrates what the user does from the first contact to the moment they get value, in the past tense, as if it already worked. Everyone else listens and writes activities on stickies, one verb each.
30 min
Build the backbone Line the activities up left to right in the order the user lives them. Merge duplicates. Read the row aloud: if it does not sound like a day in the user's life, reorder.
50 min
Break down Under each activity, write the stories that make it possible, most essential at the top. Pairs work on two activities each, then rotate. No estimates yet.
20 min
Walk the map Walk left to right and ask at each column: 'what is the smallest thing here that lets the user get to the next step?' Move everything else down.
40 min
Slice the releases Draw the first line: what crosses every column with the minimum. That is release 1. Argue only about stories that sit on the line. Then draw the second and third lines.
20 min
Name and sanity check Give each slice a name in user terms. Ask the tech lead if slice 1 is under six weeks. If not, go back to the line.
5 min
Close Photograph the board and assign someone to turn slice 1 into backlog items by tomorrow.
Pitfalls
Do not start from the backlog. If you import existing tickets, you get a feature list with a story map skin on it.
Never let a release slice skip a column. A release that stops before the user gets value is not a release, it is a demo.
Keep the backbone under 12 activities. More than that and you are mapping a company, not a product.
Afterwards
Slice 1 becomes the sprint backlog, in column order. The map stays on the wall and gets updated after each release. Pair it with a user flow to design the screens of slice 1.