In Story Mapping, what is true about the Backbone level?

• A. It contains themes representing overall purpose
• B. It contains user stories
• C. It contains tasks
• D. It contains epics

Answer: (A)

In Story Mapping, the backbone is the skeleton of the map, capturing the major user activities or themes that describe how a user achieves their goal. These themes represent the overall purpose and the natural flow of the user’s journey. The concrete work items—user stories—sit beneath the backbone under each activity, detailing the specific functionality required to accomplish that activity. Tasks are finer-grained steps used to implement a story, not what the backbone itself contains, and epics are large groupings of work that can appear under the map but aren’t the backbone’s focus. So the backbone being composed of themes representing the overall purpose is the best description.