How Product Managers Use Agile User Story Templates

Great products are comprised of great features. Ultimately, a great product feature is one that is clearly defined and provides a compelling use case. It contains a concise narrative about the problem the feature solves, how it will be used, and the benefit it provides.

Yes, I am talking about the most fundamental building blocks of products: features and requirements. You might call them stories.

First, a little background information might help. Features (or user stories) are short, simple descriptions of a new capability. Historically, they simply defined what the technology should do.

Today, they are often presented from the perspective of the value the new functionality will deliver to an end user. The feature typically has a high level description and detailed requirements to help define what it should do.

Some teams prefer to describe features in free form text and others prefer to keep them consistent and use a template.

If you use an agile software methodology, you might be familiar with casting your stories from the perspective of a user. You may use a template like this for all of your requirements.

As a (type of user), I want (to perform some task) so that I can (achieve some goal).

That’s why we recently launched an important feature in Aha! to help product managers define features and user stories. You can now specify a template for the description of a feature or requirement to drive consistency in how features are defined.

Now each new feature and requirement will have a consistent set of details when it is created by someone on your team.

The template you create will pre-fill every time a new record is created.

You can add templates for Features and Requirements. Here’s how it works for each one:

Templates for features

You can create templates for all of your feature types, including new features, improvements, bugs and even new types that you create. And for each one, you can customize the template that is used. Once you add a template, every time a new record is created, a user is guided to enter the information that is relevant for that type of feature.

The example above shows an agile-centric template.

Templates for requirements

Similar to features, each team uses requirements differently. Some teams use requirements to capture multiple details, while others create a separate requirement for each new detail.

Requirement templates gives you the ability to automatically insert text into each newly created requirement for a given workflow.

For example, a product owner might create the following requirement template to ensure that requirements are focused on a single concept and do not get bloated.

Now when someone creates a new user story, the text box will allow a user to specify which template shows up in the description field. It’s worth mentioning that user story templates are meant to be a guide. The user can edit the text if they want.

Using feature templates ensures features and requirements are clearly defined from the start, and engineering has everything they need to build exactly what you need.

Hopefully, your job as a product manager just got a little bit easier.

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ABOUT BRIAN AND AHA!

Brian seeks business and wilderness adventure. He has been the founder or early employee of six cloud-based software companies and is the CEO of Aha! -- the world's #1 product roadmap software. His last two companies were acquired by Aruba Networks [ARUN] and Citrix [CTXS].

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