an abstract for a talk I'd like to present

user-story-mapping.md

User Story Mapping is a strategy where you form a team of customers, developers, and users around your project to discover the full details of your project. Your team diagrams the story of the business process and all of the events happening around it. Once you have completed discovery of these stories, your team uses strategies to view features alongside the problems they solve. It is a powerful approach that allows your team to prioritize features, based on everyone's needs and motivations. Instead of planning our project as a building that we must build with a strong foundation, we learn to plan as if it were a vehicle. This focus delivers the Most Valuable Features to the customer by answering the question, “What’s Your Skateboard?”

In this talk, we will use some simple examples to diagram the process, discover the details of the project, and finally to identify the main objectives of the project. Through examples, we will discuss strategies for prioritizing features. Finally, we will talk about how to handle areas of risk in the story.

You will quickly see how this strategy helps you to communicate more clearly with your customers, and how it can help you all evaluate priorities based on everyone's needs. Opening communication with your customer in this way, helps to reduce frustration with unmet expectations and confusion about project deliverables, as well as improves estimation.

Participants in this talk will get an overview of the following:

• Building the story map, and using the map to find out more about the project.
• Grouping the stories based on objectives and problems solved
• Prioritizing features that deliver the most value to your customers
• Identifying risk in the story map and strategies to deal with it

First of all - I love this topic idea, and after bumping into you at a couple of conferences now via Twitter, I'm hopeful I'll see you on the speaker list at a conference soon with a talk like this!

This abstract gets across the point of the talk - the content and the problem you're solving - very well. However, it doesn't have a lot of punch to grab attention. Conference organizers selecting talks + attendees looking for a talk to attend need something that will grab their attention very quickly and get them curious to learn more about your talk.

"We will investigate how to drop the idea of minimum viable product and instead deliver the most valuable features first." - that sounds really interesting to me, and it goes counter to what most people are saying. So, try to convert that sentence into something that really grabs attention and start off your abstract with that. Make sure to pair it with a title that also grabs attention.

Thank you so much! The punch is the part I struggle with. I will reflect a bit on that and see what I can come up with!

"(is MVP widely known enough as Minimum Valuable Product?)" - yes, and in the title it's acceptable, I prefer this title.

I would also include a go-home sentence that explains exactly what the user will gain when they leave your talk - this works very well for me. For example, my debugging talk closes with "In this session we'll cover the fundamentals of installing and configuring Xdebug, configuring PhpStorm to listen to Xdebug, and then actually step debugging some scripts to find our problems." - the conference and user knows exactly what will be covered in the session.

Writing abstracts is actually like writing a sales or marketing pitch for you talk, I try to use a standard format that I stole from Grumpy Chris Hartjes, first, I set up what the problem is, then I say how I can help the attendees solve that problem. I then add my little closing line that says exactly what's been covered. It's working well for me.

😄

I think either title works. You might even consider just expanding MVP in the title that contains it.

I'd suggest compressing the first two paragraphs, as it feels like you're taking a bit long to get to the points in the third paragraph.

In late, but seconding; the first two paragraphs are a bit bloated. I'm not entirely sure what the first one is getting at (a "cluttered environment"? Not sure how that fits?). It also doesn't resonate with me personally because you have set up a specific narrative, but it's not one I have encountered myself. However, the third paragraph really sells something that I'd be into, so it's a shame that I might take myself out of the potential audience for your talk by the time I get to it.

I'd challenge you to combine those two paragraphs and then cut your word use in half to increase the "punch factor". It's rather "this then this then this then this" but I think if you write with less specificity, you can get just as much impact in half the words AND possibly expand your audience.

I think the latest is a lot clearer, @eryno @elazar and @GeeH No puns, though.

I love the topic, but reading the abstract, I'm left feeling a bit lost on what the talk will actually cover because it uses jargon that I won't understand until after seeing the talk, like: "Most Valuable Features" and "What's My Skateboard?" Honestly, What's My Skateboard? Seems like a really catchy title, and then you could have the abstract describe how this phrase can help you map out what the user wants to make sure you are starting with what they need, etc.