Process
Early on in this project, there was a feature set planned, and user scenarios defined separately, but I felt like they needed to be connected. I went through the exercise of mapping the planned features against the scenarios to make sure we didn’t have any orphans: no features that weren’t needed in any of our scenarios, and no scenarios that were left hanging because of missing important features. Once mapped, it was easy to spot patterns in the data that could signal a problem, and once there were no orphans, I felt confident we had a nice tight feature set.

What it was really good for
My main reason for doing this was for evaluating new ideas that came up, after the initial feature set had been defined. Within a creative team, I knew to expect a lot of brainstorming, a lot of “what if we did this? wouldn’t it be cool if…?” kind of questions. This tool served as a compass for me, establishing a baseline and then making sure that we stayed true to the needs of the users, so we didn’t end up building in a new feature that played into a scenario we didn’t fully support.