User story mapping - producer/consumer process

Question

My product has two types of users: producers (i.e., admin panel users) and consumers (end users).

Consumers are able to interact with an app and producers are able to process consumers' requests from the admin panel. Let's examine a simple process, say ordering something:

It seems fine if I describe consumer story only, but I need to map producer's stories too. Where should I add them? I see two ways to solve the issue:

1. Add them to the same map with a different color (there would actually be multiple cards instead of one for the producer):

   

   This doesn't seem like a good idea to me, because I'm "mixing" two user types. I haven't seen any examples that do it like this (which disturbs me).

2. Make a completely different map for the admin panel, where only producer stories will be described. This is not an ideal solution too, because it would seem like a completely different product, detached from the consumer's app.

Is there a better approach for this situation? I want to visualize the whole process, yet not clutter it up. Maybe there's a way to add another layer to the map to divide user stories or something.

Answer 1

There's no problem having multiple types of users along the same axis in the map. That's why the usual story structure is:

As A ...
I Want To ...
So That I Can ...

So your As A portion changes depending on the intended audience (Producers or Consumers). It's quite rare that you'd only have one user on the horizontal, the only reason the examples would show that is because they'd be "keeping it simple".

You could have swim lanes or different colours if you feel like it helps you in some way, but the traditional story format uses the As A ... specifically to cater for this.

Answer 2

You can do whatever you like in a User Story Map, that's one of the reasons it's a very successful process! Depending on the project, I've taken a few different tactics.

On one project we created a top level "blue" card for "Check Day - Clients" and a top level card for "Check Day - Staff" since the story of how they do their work on check day was so different that we found it easier to think about them as totally separate units.

On another project of mine, we found that we only had 1-2 "yellow" cards that were fundamentally different, so we just used a different color to separate them.

On a third project, we focused on creating sections of the user map based on user role (like my first solution) and then after we had fleshed out key parts and identified gaps in our knowledge, we merged the maps into one super big one using "release" slices in Stories on Board to identify how we'd tackle the actually build.