Applying User Story Mapping in a Loan Middle‑Platform Project

The loan middle‑platform is a key digital transformation project aimed at breaking traditional siloed architectures and supporting rapid online and offline product innovation through a shared service center.

By the end of December, three iterations of user stories had been delivered, but the team faced challenges converting user needs into development tasks, achieving consensus among business, development, and testing, and avoiding unnecessary features.

Through continuous exploration, the team implemented a user story map and integrated it with TFS, enabling deep collaboration among business, development, and testing, and shifting from a stable to an agile state.

Key steps included building a full‑picture of requirements, defining product goals and target users, extracting backbone stories (e.g., application, approval, signing, disbursement, repayment), splitting stories into detailed functional units, and confirming them through cross‑team communication.

When writing user stories, the team used a concise "As a , I want to achieve " format, enriched the description, added acceptance criteria covering normal and exception scenarios, and created test cases following the Given‑When‑Then structure.

The story map was then used to maximize business outcomes rather than feature count, serve as a bridge between business and delivery teams, and support continuous product planning, with the team conducting around ten rounds of discussion to finalize three batches of stories.

Overall, the user story map helped the loan middle‑platform achieve end‑to‑end business flow mapping in TFS, integrate development and testing, improve software quality, and accelerate delivery of business value.