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Simplify

In literary fiction, a complex story can be entertaining. A Game of Thrones and its sequels in A Song of Ice and Fire series is a good example for that. The thing is, George R. R. Martin writes those novels, and he certainly has no intention of discussing them during sprint planning meetings with stakeholders. User story maps are more similar to sagas, folktales, and other stories formed in an oral tradition. They develop in a discussion, and their understandability is granted by their simplicity. We need to create a map as simple and as small as possible, with as few story cards as possible.

So, how big should the story map be? Jim Shore defines story card hell as something that happens when you have 300 story cards and have to keep track of them. Madness, huh? This is not Sparta! Sorry Jim for the bad pun, but you are absolutely right, in the 300 range, you will not understand the map, and the whole discussion part will completely fail. The user stories will be lost, and the audience will not even try to understand what's happening.

There is no ideal number of cards in a story map, but aim low. Then, eliminate most of the cards. Clutters will destroy the conversation.

In most card games, you will have from two to seven cards in hand, with some rare exceptions. The most popular card game both online and offline is Texas Hold 'em Poker. In that game, each player deals with only two cards. This is because human thought processes and discussions work best with a small number of objects. Sometimes, the number of objects in the real world is high. Our mind is good at simplifying, classifying, and grouping things into manageable units. With that said, most books and conference presentations about user story mapping show us a photo of a wall covered with sticky notes. The viewer will have absolutely no idea what's on them, but one thing is certain, it looks like a complex project. I have bad news for you: projects with a complex user story map never get finished, and if they do get finished, to a degree they will fail. The abundance of sticky notes means that the communication and simplification process needs one or more iterations. Throw away most of the sticky notes! To do that, you need to understand the problem better.