Top 3 User Story Mistakes Hindering Agility

Yes, sub-par user stories can destroy agility! How do you know if you and your team are on the right track?

Many teams today use user stories to capture needs, requirements, and backlog items.

As an educator and coach who sees a lot of team's user stories, there is A LOT of room for growth where teams can increase the agility, pace, quality, and customer value being delivered by improving the user stories!

Here are 5 signs that your user stories have some opportunities for optimization:

1. User Stories carry over from sprint to sprint.
2. User Stories are not able to be demoed from an end-user/customer point of view at the Sprint Review/Demo, or you cannot demo an end-user/customer point of view increment in 2 weeks or less.
3. Business and customer/user engagement is low with the team.
4. "Story Creep" - the scope of each user story seems to keep growing once the team has started working on it.
5. User Stories focus on the technical details and tasks rather than the user actions and scenarios

The Top 3 Mistakes:

1. The user story is not about a real human end-user of the system or product
2. The user story does not focus on user a action or goal the end-user has with a system or product
3. The user story does not provide motivation or value context about the user goal/action

It is really easy for teams to make these mistakes and create "logical" excuses of why they are doing so. I have heard about them all, and been able to correct these misunderstandings!

What I find is that these "logical" excuses are based on a misunderstanding about the purpose of user stories and agile ways of working.

When these misunderstandings are corrected and skills are gained in how to truly use user stories to their potential, user stories become a true catalyst to agility for the team! Team and organizational performance can dramatically improve!

On Nov 9th, 2021, I'll be teaching a workshop on LinkedIn LIVE on "How To Write Good User Stories". Join me to dig in, practice, and learn more about how to write good user stories!

About The Workshop:

Writing a good user story as an agile team seems easy in theory, but then in practice, all sorts of things come up that make one question if their project scenario makes sense to use the best practices for good user stories.? In this interactive session, we will cover the 4 steps to writing a user story and the most common challenges in each step that come up, and how to overcome them.? Feel free to bring your examples to share and apply the principles in with the class and instructor.? In this workshop, you will walk away with actionable steps, tips, and examples from the session of how to write high-quality user stories for all sorts of different project and product types that will inspire powerful team conversations, quality products, and teamwork.

?Recording of the session will be available for ticketed attendees for up to 6 months after the event.

?I’m participating in a limited test with LinkedIn where select instructors and industry experts are creating ticketed interactive events. Thank you for your patience as this product is built for testing purposes. If you encounter any issues with any part of the purchase or event processes, please let us know.?

How To Register For The Workshop?

Learn more about and register the workshop here

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Angela is passionate about helping organizations and professionals modernize analysis practices. Angela has been working to modernize analysis practices for over 20 years with a focus on innovation, collaboration, and lean analysis techniques to keep teams moving forward!