10 Tips for Writing Good User Stories

1 Users Come First

As its name suggests, a user story describes how a customer or user employs the product; it is told from the user’s perspective. What’s more, user stories are particularly helpful to capture a specific functionality, such as, searching for a product or making a booking. The following picture illustrates the relationship between the user, the story, and the product functionality (symbolised by the circle).

If you don’t know who the users and customers are and why they would want to use the product, then you should not write any user stories. Carry out the necessary user research first, for example, by observing and interviewing users. Otherwise, you take the risk of writing speculative stories that are based on beliefs and ideas—but not on data and empirical evidence.

2 Use Personas to Discover the Right Stories

A great technique to capture your insights about the users and customers is working with personas. Personas are fictional characters that are based on first-hand knowledge of the target group. They usually consist of a name and a picture; relevant characteristics, behaviours, and attitudes; and a goal. The goal is the benefit the persona wants to achieve, or the problem the character wants to see solved by using the product.

But there is more to it: The persona goals help you discover the right stories: Ask yourself what functionality the product should provide to meet the goals of the personas, as I explain in my post From Personas to User Stories. You can download a handy template to describe your personas from romanpichler.com/tools/persona-template.

3 Create Stories Collaboratively

User stories are intended as a lightweight technique that allows you to move fast. They are not a specification, but a collaboration tool. Stories should never be handed off to a development team. Instead, they should be embedded in a conversation: The product owner and the team should discuss the stories together. This allows you to capture only the minimum amount of information, reduce overhead, and accelerate delivery.

You can take this approach further and write stories collaboratively as part of your product backlog grooming process. 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 should  consider using another, more formal technique to capture the product functionality, such as, use cases.

4 Keep your Stories Simple and Concise

Write your stories so that they are easy to understand. Keep them simple and concise. Avoid confusing and ambiguous terms, and use active voice. Focus on what’s important, and leave out the rest. The template below puts the user or customer modelled as a persona into the story and makes its benefit explicit. It is based on by Rachel Davies’ popular template, but I have replaced user role with persona name to connect the story with the relevant persona.

As ,

I want

so that .

Use the template when it is helpful, but don’t feel obliged to always apply it. Experiment with different ways to write your stories to understand what works best for you and your team.

5 Start with Epics

An epic is a big, sketchy, coarse-grained story. It is typically broken into several user stories over time—leveraging the user feedback on early prototypes and product increments. You can think of it as a headline and a placeholder for more detailed stories.

Starting with epics allows you to sketch the product functionality without committing to the details. This is particularly helpful for describing new products and features: It allows you to capture the rough scope, and it buys you time to learn more about how to best address the needs of the users.

It also reduces the time