What is a User Story Map? How Does it Help Agile Team Operations?

[#1]

According to the 11th Annual State of Agile Report, 35% of agile teams use story maps. A statistic that increased 6% since 2014.

What is a Story Map?

A User Story Map is a collaborative practice that guides an agile team in the creation of their product backlog. The story map captures the journey a customer takes with the product including activities and tasks they undertake. 

Creating the storymap as a team ensures team members are on the same page from the start of development through to ongoing delivery of new releases. 

How Companies Use Easy Agile User Story Maps to Solve Problems 

Shared Understanding Through Collaboration: allows distributed teams to conduct collaborative story mapping sessions in real-time by creating simple and elegant story maps alongside Jira Software agile boards

Focus on Desired Customer Outcomes: visualization of the customer journey allows teams to identify and implement features based on customer outcomes, and track progress at a glance against a story map 

Bring the Customer Journey to Life: the transformation of the flat backlog to a customer centric story map means teams have a better understanding of their customer journey and what customers want 

Prioritising Actions Based on Value to Customer: visualization of the customer journey allows teams to prioritise work based on "value to customer", resulting in better outcomes with less waste 

[acanis]

Its is very complicated to map stories into just one journey step. Usally, EPICs are big Stories with a bigger value.

You use Stories in different way. That should work too, but how can I map bigger features into just one journey step? You cant slice everything that small. If you get for example a new way to navigate or to find things, it helps the user in different journey steps.

How do you handle that?