Story+PD: Questioning User Stories and Epics in Agile

Part of a series at the intersection of Storytelling and Product Development.

One can’t explore the use of Story in the Product world without handling Agile and its very specific jargon & rituals. (Excuse me, “ceremonies.”)

One conversation revealed a friend who had been looking forward to a job at a mature tech company, and lamented that for the next two years all he seemed to do was ‘groom a backlog’ of user stories.

That’s a much different relationship to product development and to stories than tend to imagine. I’m a product person, who gathers user/customer stories, and I’m a storyteller. That friend’s job doesn’t sound… inspiring. And yet, Agile has taken over, at least in Silicon Valley. Lots of grooming going on. Of stories.

Now, I’m not a software developer, but because of my long history in HCD and Design Thinking, I know enough to be dangerous with many tenets shared with Agile.

So I think it’s worth understanding how Agile uses stories, what an Agile story is, what it isn’t, and what tradeoffs we make in translation. I wonder how Agile methodology might influence what people coming up through modern digital PD even think a story is. So I’ve been talking with people to learn more. I’ll share some of those notes and reflections in a future posts here and on my the Ideas page of my consulting website, abbizzo.com in coming days and weeks.