StoriesOnBoard

Vorteile

Story mapping as a technique is meant to create shared understanding through externalized thinking. The way that storiesonboard supports this so fluently is what I like most about it. When I ask someone to explain their project, I can visualize what they're saying at the speed that they are explaining it. It's that easy to use.I use it to visually map any kind of project I'm involved in. From large scale software projects to planning my own home rennovations.When working with clients, it was the starting point to visualise the scope, the board to give context for estimations, the basis for a client offer and the overview to track progress once we started.

Nachteile

Only a minor remark, but the export to excel - while perfectly servicable - could be improved. In particular, the fact that it exports some content to comments instead of new columns.One integration I'm hoping for is the ability to embed a story map in a whiteboarding tool - such as Miro - to visually group even more relevant information around the map itself.

Vorteile

I think anybody familiar with and who has effectively utilized story mapping in their development process may find this question rhetorical. Just in case though, my top two would be the collaborative story mapping functionality and second the road mapping and project reporting functionality that it also contains.

Nachteile

There's not much that I don't like about the software actually. Anything I've found that didn't feel right on the application I've sent directly to their support and they've addressed it right away, so its hard to find anything to write up here as a con.

In Betracht gezogene Alternativen

Gründe für den Wechsel zu StoriesOnBoard

Vorteile

The possibility to make a story map, is a novel tool, easy to use in some aspects, integration with tools like Jira is simple and easy to use. the view of 2 and 3 levels seems like a good idea.

Nachteile

313/5000
exchanging cards between columns is so simple, in some cases it is complicated, we do not have a possibility of moving in lots or multiple selection of cards, it creates a card is not so simple, there is no quick search, the printing option is not friendly, export in XLS could be better.

Vorteile

Easy to learn and use, comprehensive and dedicated to product management.

Nachteile

No whiteboard feature, which would be helpful in some stages - for this, a Miro integration would be great.

In Betracht gezogene Alternativen

Gründe für den Wechsel zu StoriesOnBoard

Vorteile

Keyboard steering, support, redesign to modern look, filtering, adding colour

Nachteile

Selecting more than one card, new way of adding colour to the redesigned maps - it's not as quick as earlier was

In Betracht gezogene Alternativen

Gründe für den Wechsel zu StoriesOnBoard

Vorteile

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!

Nachteile

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.

Vorteile

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.

Nachteile

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.

In Betracht gezogene Alternativen

Gründe für den Wechsel zu StoriesOnBoard

Vorteile

I often have meetings where we bring together a large group of offline and online stakeholders, StoriesOnBoard has helped me structure this meeting while we are brainstorming on product design and the E2E process. The result is easily improved during follow-up meetings or exported to an Excel or pdf and shared within the organisation.

Nachteile

I wish I could motivate my organisation to work more in this tool.

Vorteile

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.

Nachteile

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.

Vorteile

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.

Nachteile

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.

Vorteile

The 3 elements that I like most is:
- the easy of use during customer collaboration during definition and refinement of scope and planning, and
- the easy integration with JIRA and Slack
- the steady flow of new features and possibilities

Nachteile

It is improving but the administration and management within the tool is a little bit less straightforward

Vorteile

Love the intuitive interface--easy to search your workspace, cards feel real, two level collapsed board view, story map panning & zooming works great. Good keyboard shortcuts. Overall I'd describe it as streamlined and pleasant to use. They highlight counts of cards, allow you to use labels, collapse and expand, manage users & see an activity feed, etc. Yes, you can connect your workspace to your JIRA instance and keep cards synchronized between map & project. I get the feeling that the team cares about delivering a great product to their users from the updates they make and the tone/content of the newsletter.

Nachteile

Like many comparable software products, you must upgrade to have the import/export functionality or JIRA integration. I also wish there were an easier way to share a snapshot of a board. Sometimes I need to share a view of the board with a stakeholder, I want them to be able to quickly view without having to login, and a PDF or screenshot won't cut it.

Vorteile

It's sticky notes on steroids. Easily the best online story mapping software I've used. Jira integration is awesome. I hate making Jira cards so being able to push and sync the work I do in StoriesonBoard to Jira is a major time/sanity saver. . Overall, it's very easy to set up, use and modify. There are a few oddities about it that are a little annoying, but overall it's been a great tool for me and my team.

Nachteile

These are very specific things that maybe just bother me but here they are. Rearranging releases could be easier (drag and drop maybe), the description section of the card is not scrollable when editing- have to use the arrow keys to see what above of below the fold. Adding color to a card is a little funny. Maybe just show all the available colors off the bat instead of selecting the colors you want to use before you can apply a color. Petty things, I know. :)

Vorteile

1. The intuitiveness of the User Experience. Almost needs no training.
2. The ease with with one can simulate a real-life story mapping experience on a traditional physical wall.

Nachteile

It's slightly unaffordable for 100% of my African clients. They can pay something, but they always run away whenever they see the price, even though they may have had a fantastic experience during our prior story-mapping sessions.

Vorteile

The ease of use when coming up with epics, features and user stories.

Nachteile

I would like if there was a way to enlarge the cards, so those with larger titles aren't cut off and need to be clicked to view the name in entirety. Also, I would like if there was a way to add notes/comments to the board at-large, not just to individual cards.

Vorteile

Incredibly easy to set up, thanks to the very intuitive user interface. All features are clearly laid out and easy to comprehend.

Nachteile

Feature set, especially communication tools are limited. I wish I could more easily assign cards to a specific user, or leave a comment intended for a specific user.

Vorteile

My company uses this for our story maps and it has been an easy way to get our cards from the in-person sessions to the online view. While we have remote sprint 0s, we have used SOB online to replace the in-person session.

Nachteile

There is no way to move multiple cards at once with a ctrl+click or shift+click.

Vorteile

So easy for non-technical types and non-project managers to use. Good guidance and examples about what makes for a good story.

Nachteile

I wish the right-click context menu was more functional, e.g. delete a card via right click.

Vorteile

It integrates with ADO easily. I can visualize the development of a project easily.

Nachteile

It needs more integration with Microsoft products. I wish the same level of integration was placed as it is in Jira.

Vorteile

The best feature I like about this software is the integration with JIRA. The card integrates will JIRA and its on my board. The other great thing about it is that we can divide the project into multiple releases.

Nachteile

Not sure if we had an option to reverse integrate from JIRA stories to stories on board. This would be a good addition as existing projects could be onboarded easily.

Vorteile

Story management correctly done
The support

Nachteile

No api but I have the chance to have the get opération it’s a good start!

Vorteile

The ease of card creation and organization, along with the collaboration abilities, makes this the strongest app for us in laying out our epics and stories.

Nachteile

Some of the newer features are beginning to crowd out the core features.

Vorteile

Virtual post-it notes, create epics and stories, and export to Jira. Done!

Nachteile

People spend a couple of minutes futzing about at most meetings, before we get on a roll.

Vorteile

It works in the same way I'd story map with physical post-its/cards so it fits perfectly into our process. It does what it does well, is simple and easy to use. I really like the fact that I can give my entire team view only access without having to pay for additional licenses.

Vorteile

The design of the website
The easy to use interface

Nachteile

No cons that I could find. It works really well

Vorteile

StoriesOnBoard filled a gap between the planning meetings and the day to day project execution. Before it was difficult for the project team and manager to see the big picture of the goals of the project as we were either using a physical wall to track tasks or a task tracking tool. Having team members remote, it was very difficult to work just using a physical project board. StoriesOnBoard allows the entire team to see the board online, quickly see the status of the tasks and easily update the tasks. There is virtually no learning curve to use this product, which is very important to team members who need to use their allocated time to do the work for the project rather than trying to figure out how to use a project tracking tool.
As the project manager, I also like the ability to export to a spreadsheet format.

Nachteile

We are an office 365 shop. Would like to see some type of integration there rather than just export.

Vorteile

- You can easily create releases
- Creating stories and adding pictures is great
- Github integration really helps us push and track our stories and how we deliver on them
- It is extremely easy to copy your story map into storiesonboard and continue to maintain it from there

Nachteile

- The only only at the moment is that managing releases is not the best. You need to go into a separate menu just to move releases around. When working with micro releases this is a hassle.

Vorteile

My team used Stories on Board as our story mapping tool of choice for a requirements definition project with a client. We ran 8-10 story mapping workshops using the tool and documenting the stories as we progressed through the workshops. The client loved the tool as did we. It was very effective for capturing the stories, quickly moving things around as priorities shifted or became more clear (e.g., capturing Minimum Viable Product). We used the color coding feature extensively to help us and the client track which stories were (1) identified but not yet documented, (2) partially or full documented but not yet agreed, and (3) fully agreed by the client. It was effective at capturing the major workflow associated with the epic-level story, and then breaking those down into individual story cards. We assessed a few other tools but found them to be too complicated and/or too expensive for what we needed. We wanted something simple and Stories on Board fit our need.

Nachteile

Our client didn't use the tool, so we had to export everything into Excel and/or Word for delivery to them at the end of the process, which was a bit cumbersome. Not really a knock on the tool though; would have been easier if the client would have just used the tool also!

Vorteile

Two way sync with Trello, Jira, Github, and Tracker integration makes it an easy choice no matter what engineering or development team prefers. Awesome for bridging and focusing upon product management and strategy prior to committing to development.

Nachteile

The only thing missing for me, last time I checked, was attachment sync and maybe showing card covers.

Vorteile

StoriesOnBoard is the primary tool used in my industry for organizing user stories, and the reason is because they are one of the first tools to come up with a nice, visual way to view all of your user stories together so that you can make planning and prioritization decisions. That being said, the platform hasn't really moved beyond that basic premise to provide the type of value product managers are looking for in a tool like this today.

Nachteile

Realtime collaboration doesn't exist in StoriesOnBoard. This is a major deficiency of the product. In today's world, tools like Miro are replacing StoriesOnBoard (even though they don't have easy ways to attach details or estimates to the stories) simply because they allow realtime collaboration by groups of people. Stories On Board is really only designed to have one person editing the board at a time.

Vorteile

This application makes story mapping simple and collaborative for distributed teams. The integration with Jira saves a tremendous amount of time and ensures that everyone is kept updated with the latest thinking.

Nachteile

I would like to see personas developed to allow for filtering and more complex journeys.

Vorteile

It gives a one place access to get information on all running projects. It has some excellent options to customize and group the cards based on the type of work, Project. The swim lines options is very useful in prioritizing the work.

Nachteile

The UI/UX has to be tweaked a bit to be more keyboard friendly. There are not many keyboard shortcuts. Deleting a card is bit painful as it is a 2 step process.

Vorteile

It's simple to follow the flow of what we are working on as a product team. The parent-child relationships of the cards make features and functionality easy to define for stakeholders and team members.

Nachteile

Would love to see some more flexibility in how cards can be created and managed. More layers would also be helpful.

Vorteile

Convenient, cost effective and simple. There is a wide selection of products that are often offered at a lower price than retail. They also have great sales. Amazon prime is a great option for anyone using the software as it guaranties satisfaction and timely arrival.

Nachteile

Hard to tell name brands vs imitations and quality. Assessing size/fit is difficult. I have ordered glasses for example, that were supposed to be polarized Ray Bans, however upon arrival they clearly were not authentic. Be weary of non-amazon prime content.

Vorteile

I manage around 7 products and being able to drag and drop stories into sprints and keep on top of sprint capacity is my favourite feature of this tool

Nachteile

You can't currently can't link to a story from one board to another.

Vorteile

Ease of creating releases
Business flow maps

Nachteile

No good editor
No good linking of releases

Vorteile

It's a good way of viewing your epics/themes in one place, and is easier to use at initiation than Jira.

Nachteile

It's still quite feature poor, so we ended up using Jira as a team for sprint by sprint development, although I keep stories on board up for my long term backlog.

Vorteile

I have been using StoriesOnBoard for a few years already and this is my favorite tool in terms of dealing with complex projects. I love how easy and intuitive story mapping is and how great it is for planning MVPs and Development Phases and sharing it with the team.

The tickets are easy to manage and the export options allow to add it as a presentation pitch.

Nachteile

The design might be a little old-school, but generally all is good

Vorteile

The software is extremely intuitive and very visually oriented. This allows non-technical project members to understand and use it in no time at all. We used it mostly during meetings and as a collaboration tool. The software can do much, much more but we needed it first and foremost to communicate and get a shared feeling of what the project result should be.

Nachteile

Would have liked some more attributes to categorize cards.

Vorteile

I love all of the features. It's hardly missing anything. Very simple to use, fairly priced, no bugs that I'm aware of.

Nachteile

I would love an integration with Aha! so that I can view and edit my stories there before pushing them to JIRA.

Vorteile

Stories on Board it a really easy to use applications, its a really helpful tool to make your product discoveries easier or even your product maps.

Nachteile

The only thing that personally really dislike its the option to move cards between columns, you need to do it one by one, maybe a bulk option could best.

Vorteile

- How accurately it looks like a physical story map
- Ease of creating release schedules
- Jira integration

Nachteile

- Some UX bugs
- Lack of browser spell check support (this is a big one for me)

Vorteile

I can easily view my short term and long term plans, and share them with my distributed team. The connection to Jira makes getting the next batch up requirements to the dev team quick and easy.

Nachteile

It only allows for one integration per story map, so managing one product tied to multiple projects in Jira can be difficult.

Vorteile

- very intuitive
- very straight forward
- nothing "in the way"
- it is exactly what it says it is
- pro-active support that accelerates use

Nachteile

- I have not found any challenges yet

Vorteile

* User friendly and visually appealing tool
* Free trial
* Learning materials
* More useful features than their competitors

Nachteile

That's not a con, rather I wish they had some free plans for users who don't user Story Mapping regularly, just from time to time.

Vorteile

Of all the products with some sort of feature for creating Story Maps, ProductsOnBoard surely is the one that gives the user the best experience and feel for that important and strategic work. It has the features that you expect and the keyboard shortcuts work as they should, giving the user a great user interface.

Nachteile

StoriesOnBoard is a Story Mapping tool. And thats it. As a starting entrepreuner sometimes we have to choose wisely where to put the money. And, for small businesses, paying for a platform that will have only one use in your workflow maybe is not the smarter choice.

Vorteile

I really liked that the tool is built on a methodology that would help our team keep a user-centric approach. My team is fairly new to agile and StoriesOnBoard helps us greatly to adopt to their new methodology. It was also critical that it has an integration with Jira since almost all our processes rely on Jira.

Nachteile

I've had no issues with the tool so far.

Vorteile

I like the ability to work thought what we need and don't need every release and walk our clients through each element and really let them drive the process.

Nachteile

Things can be a bit clunky, less now with the new UI refresh.

Vorteile

It is easy to use and provides godd possibilities for documentation of stories (picures, links, text)

Nachteile

We had to drop this wonderful tool because it doesn't provide any synchronization of the epics with Jira (only the stories are synchronized)

Vorteile

Pleasant look.
Easy editing with shortcuts.
Brilliant integration with Trello & other.
Just the right amount of features - has what you need, but doesn't feel bloated.

Nachteile

Some quirks in Safari/Mac.
Sometimes I feel a need for one more level at the top of the map (eg. "Actor" above "Activity")