User Story Mapping

Builds Jeff Patton style story maps with the standard two-axis layout: horizontal for user journey flow (activities, steps, tasks), vertical for priority and release slicing. The skill walks you through defining segment and persona, then breaking down 3-5 activities into steps and tasks, with explicit quality checks at each level. It's designed for aligning product, design, and engineering around user workflows rather than feature lists. Most useful when kicking off something new or trying to identify your MVP scope. The framework forces you to think in user behaviors instead of product capabilities, which is the whole point. Includes anti-patterns like confusing activities with features and treating the map as a static backlog.

skills.sh installs: 2.8K
GitHub stars: 7.9K
last updated: Aug 21, 2026

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Install

$ npx -y skills add deanpeters/product-manager-skills --skill user-story-mapping --agent claude-code

Installs into .claude/skills of the current project.

Files

Purpose

Visualize the user journey by creating a hierarchical map that breaks down high-level activities into steps and tasks, organized left-to-right as a narrative flow. Use this to build shared understanding across product, design, and engineering, prioritize features based on user workflows, and identify gaps or opportunities in the user experience.

This is not a backlog—it's a strategic artifact that shows how users accomplish their goals, which then informs what to build.

Input

Works best with: The product or user workflow being mapped. Also useful: The primary user, the end-to-end narrative as you understand it, existing backlog items to place, and release goals.

Anything supplied with the invocation itself — text after the skill name, a pasted context dump, or an appended ARGUMENTS: line — counts as answers already given. Use it and skip whatever it covers; don't re-ask.

Arriving empty-handed? That works too. The skill asks whose journey you're mapping and what they're trying to get done, then builds backbone → tasks → slices.

SKILL.md on GitHub

Details

Repository: github.com/deanpeters/product-manager-skills
Categories: Release Management, Productivity & Planning, Automation & Workflows
First seen: Apr 16, 2026