10 Tips for Creating Great User Stories

© 2016 Pichler Consulting Ltd
10 Tips for
Creating Great
User Stories
Roman Pichler
@romanpichler
romanpichler.com

About Roman
• Product management consultant, teacher, and author
– 15 years experience in teaching and coaching product managers and helping
companies establish an effective product management function
– Specialised in agile and in lean practices
• Business owner and product manager
– I try to walk my own talk Product Strategy and Product Roadmap
Practices for the Digital Age
STRATEGIZE
ROMAN PICHLER
My books

Here is My Take
A user story describes how a person interacts with the
product and uses some product functionality.
• Communicates the who, what, why.
• Replaces traditional requirements.

Users Come First
Product
User Story
User or Customer
• Who are the users?
• What do they want from
the product?

Users Come First
• Always write a user story from the user’s perspective.
– Who are the users?
– What do the users want from the product?
• If you don’t know who the users are and why they would
want to use the product, then do not write any stories.
– Carry out the necessary research work before you create any
user stories. Otherwise your stories will be based on beliefs and
ideas rather than data and empirical evidence.

Use Personas to Discover
the Right Stories
GoalPicture &
Name
Details
What does the persona
look like?
What is the character's
name?
What are the persona’s
relevant characteristics and
behaviors?
For instance, demographics,
psychographics and
behavioral attributes.
Why would the persona
want to use or buy the
product?
What benefit does the
persona want to gain, or
which problem does the
persona want to solve?

Create Stories Collaboratively
Product
Owner
Development Team
ScrumMaster/Coach
Facilitates

Create Stories Collaboratively
• A user story is not a specification, but an communication
and collaboration tool. Never hand off a story to a
development team but embed it in a conversation.
• You can take this approach further and write stories
collaboratively. This leverages the creativity and the
knowledge of the team and results in better user stories.
• If you can’t involve the development team in the user story
work, then you use another, more formal technique, such
as, use cases.

Make Your Stories
Simple and Concise
• Capture your stories so that they are easy to understand.
– Focus on what’s important, and leave out the rest.
– Avoid confusing terms and use active voice.
• The following template is a good starting point:
• If you use personas, then put them in your stories.

Start with Epics
• An epic is a big, sketchy, coarse-grained story, like a
headline and placeholder for more detailed stories.
• Starting with epics allows you to sketch the product
functionality without committing to the details.
• It also reduces the time and effort required to integrate new
insights and evolve your stories based on user feedback.

Refine the Stories and
Get them Ready
Epic User Story
Big, coarse-
grained, sketchy
Ready:
• Shared understanding
• Feasible
• Testable
User Feedback,
New Insights

Refine the Stories to Get them Ready
• Break your epics into smaller, detailed stories using the
insights gained from exposing product increments to the
users.
• All dev team members should have a shared understanding
of the story’s meaning.
• The story should not too big and comfortably fit into
a sprint.
• You can determine if the story is done.

Add Acceptance Criteria
• Acceptance criteria complement the narrative: They allow
you to describe the conditions that must be fulfilled so that
the story is done.
• The criteria enrich the story, they make it testable, and they
ensures that the story can be demoed or released to the
users and other stakeholders.
• As a rule of thumb, I like to use three to five acceptance
criteria for each detailed story.

Use Paper Cards
• Even if your stories are stored electronically, it is worthwhile
to use paper cards when you write new stories.
• Paper cards are cheap and easy to use.
• They facilitate collaboration: Every one can take a card and
jot down an idea.
• Cards can be easily grouped on the table or wall to check
for consistency and completeness and to visualise
dependencies.

Visualise Your Stories
• Make your stories visible and put them up on the wall.
• This fosters collaboration and creates transparency.
• What’s more, it makes it obvious when you add too many
stories too quickly, as you will start running out of wall
space.

Roman’s Product Canvas
The users and the
customers with their
needs captures as
personas.
The big picture with the desired user
experience (UX): the user journeys, the
product functionality, the visual design, and
the nonfunctional properties.
Epics, scenarios, storyboards, story maps,
workflows, design sketches, mock-ups, and
constraint stories are helpful techniques to
capture the big picture.
The goal of the next
sprint with detailed
user stories.

Don't Write User Stories If You
• Describe complex user interactions and the visual design.
Employ other techniques instead, such as, story maps,
storyboards, sketches, and mockups.
• Spec an architectural element like a component or service.
Instead, use a modeling language like UML.
• Quickly validate an idea with a throwaway prototype or
mockup. Writing stories may not be necessary at all in this
case.

You can find more information at:
romanpichler.com
Thank You!
I look forward to your questions:
info@romanpichler.com
@romanpichler

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