• Product Owner

Writing user stories? No, you don’t.

No user story without a conversation

Writing user stories is not a solo activity of the product owner. They are the minutes of the conversation the product owner has with her team. The user story format helps keep you aware that you are adding value for customers. As a reminder:

“As a [person in situation], I want [feature] so that [new features]”

This format is concise. Too concise to serve as a briefing for the entire team. A conversation is always needed. So don’t say “write user stories,” but say “note user stories.

A user story is not a story

The name “user story” puts many scrummers on the wrong track. It’s not about a story, a customer journey or a UX flow. These things are all way too big if you have to build a dozen of them within a sprint. And scrum is precisely about getting an overview of what you have to do and what is important.

So a user story is not a story but a work package. A clear piece of functionality that you and your entire team can add to the product. A work package has a clear cost and a clear added value. That way you can prioritize it. All work packages together make the total project clear. A work package helps the product owner to decide at any time what is the best investment. A story is too vague for that.

A user story is not about personas

Features can be relevant to multiple personas. Personas are about marketing, communication and the breadth of the product. Writing user stories is much more situational. The user story tells about the situation the user is in: arriving customer, returning customer, heavy user,… So it’s more about a phase in the Customer Journey. It is easier to link a relevant ‘so that’ to the user story. The ‘so that’ then says something about what the user can do after she uses the described feature. Perhaps the next step in the Customer Journey.

Interactions about processes & tools

So the term “user story” can lead to misunderstandings. Especially when user stories are used as a briefing and interaction with the team gets lost. There are probably better names to think of. But that is not important because Scrum is an Agile method. Collaboration and interaction between people are more important than the names of the tools!