RO Innovation vs. StoriesOnBoard

BL is great is you're going from a manual process to something more sophisticated. I'm not sure what the competitive landscape looks like with regards to Reference Software nowadays, but when we were evaluating a few years ago, BL was ahead of all other vendors in terms of functionality and integrations with SFDC

Incentivized

As mentioned earlier, we also use StoriesOnBoard to create other processes (customer and employee journey). We use the swim lanes to differentiate between measures, tools and processes and working with them is very easy and understandable for this purpose.

Less easy is the use of context, i.e. when one part of a story map depends on another story map. This cannot be avoided (at least for us) to avoid creating redundancy (and the risk of creating different stages). At appropriate places, we refer to the other map in the title.

• The system provides more visibility into available references and prevents references from being over-used. It allows the client (reference) to choose how often they can be contacted in a given time period and provides a closed-loop feedback mechanism to make sure the client is providing positive responses.
• Allows account executives (sales people) to easily request references based on: product Used, customer vertical, location, account size, expertise, etc.
• Uses a “Five Star” method to show how relevant the answers are when a results are returned from a search.

• User role management
• Jira integration
• Keyboard shortcuts
• Filtering by personas

• Unintuitive user interface
• Defensive meetings with Upland RO Innovation staff when requests for improvements are shared
• Searching features are clunky, outdated, and unhelpful

Incentivized

• Switching the view to a vertical mode (easier to scroll).
• Better availability of information on user story mapping.
• Possibility to link to activities and steps from other maps (Context).

Boulder Logic is just so easy and is in Salesforce

Incentivized

StoriesOnBoard works really well; all features are well thought through. It could look a bit fresher, although the new updated dashboard is already much better than it was.

No known issues

No known issues

The process of asking each reference how often they’d be willing to be contacted was the biggest task.
We made assumptions for current clients, and ask each new client once they become a customer.
Along with which specific skill-set they’d be willing to be a reference

While I was one of the decision makers in this process, I didn't sit on the demos for the other providers (I was brought in further in the sales process). My understanding from my team was that BL was much more configurable and support more robust integrations that the competitors

Incentivized

The only other competitor we looked at was cardboardit.com. Both had solid functionality, but StoriesOnBoard was more user-friendly and quick to learn and use in our opinion.

• Lack of ability to implement references program
• Stalled deployment of program

Incentivized

• StoriesOnBoard (and story mapping in general) creates a low-cost visual method of aligning on high-level business and technical requirements early in a project and provides an ongoing reference as the project progresses. Having this alignment is critical for the later stages of the project.