Really great tool with continual improvement

I really like the way it allows us to collaborate on stories, releases, and epics. Integrating with Jira is a very nice feature that is better and better with new releases. Also, adding an "undo" feature has been 100% excellent.

Pros

I like the collaboration between team members as well as between teams and clients. It solves the problem of telling the release/estimate story in a way that the client can have some influence!

Cons

User management is a bit tough. Even as an admin, adding yourself to an existing board makes it necessary to go find a different user management area, which is always strange.

Still the best story mapping tool in the market

Pros

I like the keyboard shortcuts the most in StoriesOnBoard. It allows for easy navigation and modification of the cards in an efficient way when compared to other story mapping tools out in the market.

Cons

I would have normally said the visual design aesthetics could have been improved but the latest set of updates have made a drastic difference. I wish the integration between JIRA & StoriesOnBoard would be more robust for Nextgen projects.

Feature mapping in virtual world

Pros

Ease of creating releases Business flow maps

Cons

No good editor No good linking of releases

Takes the pain out of sprint 0 and keeping your high-level vision in focus

I love this product! As a consultant product owner it brings sanity to an often crazy process of prioritizing an upcoming build phase. I have also had multiple good interactions with the support team when something isn't working right, as well as direct access with the engineering team to request new features.

Pros

Stories on board doesn't do everything, and that's why I love it. What it does it does very well and that is giving you a high-level view of your features and epics and a place to work on planning and grooming stories before they go into a build. I use it extensively to drop in features, stories, and tasks that are needed for a product build, often times before the structure of the build is fully realized. Once in the tool you can move stories around easily, split them if they're too big, combine similar stories together, and then push stories to Jira for managing sprints, and pulling the backlog from Jira to organize into upcoming sprints and releases.

Cons

As of this writing, there are two features that I need to make my life easier. 1. Stories on Board only connects to one instance of Jira, which is fine for product companies, but is insufficient for consulting shops that may use their own Jira as well as client Jira instances. Support for multiple Jira instances is on the roadmap, and I can't wait until it's there. 2. Swimlanes in Stories on Board represent releases in Jira, and I want to also have sprint-level swimlanes. There's an easy workaround to just use releases called Sprint 1, Sprint 2, etc, and that works, but is a bit more work than if it were a natively supported feature.

Product Story Mapping on Student Projects

We use Stories on Board with our student teams to get them to understand the product/solution better than just diving into the coding. This system allow for them to really lay out the product in advance and then use the map to help everyone know where they are with their work.

Pros

I like the ability to be able to easily do the release planning right from your story map. Also the GitHub integration saved the teams a ton of time.

Cons

The user interface is still a little clunky. Sometimes you are not sure how to do a task so you have to try something and potentially back it out to correct things.