Product: A User Story
What is a User Story
As a Product Manager, creating user stories is an important part of product development. In easy terms, a user story is a short and simple description of a product feature, told from the perspective of the person who wants that feature or as a potential/current user of a product or service.
A user story captures the user persona, the function the feature must perform, and the user’s overall requirements. You can see a common formula for creating a user story in the image below.
They are used to define the product backlog in an Agile development workflow. The product backlog is a collection of user stories that drives feature development for a product or service. User stories are the smallest unit of work within typical agile frameworks, such as Scrum and Kanban.
Epics are higher-level user stories, whose work spans across multiple sprints. You can use Epics to group similar user stories working toward a common goal.
Examples Of User Stories
Sandra wants to be recommended destinations by location.
Uche wants to transfer stocks as a gift to his wife.
Jane needs to share her location with her family to be safe.
Ene wants to know her semester tuition so she can make payment.
Why Create User Stories?
Some benefits of user stories are:
- They keep the teams’ focused on solving problems for real users.
- They enable collaboration.
- They encourage the team to think objectively and creatively about how to solve a problem.
- User stories help you define how your user will perceive and engage with each feature.
User Story Acceptance Criteria
This specifies when a user story should be considered “finished”. Writing good acceptance criteria is a good way to investigate all of the aspects of a user story and define its reach. A user story can only be considered complete under a certain set of conditions, and you need total alignment on what those conditions should be.
For example, let’s look at this user story:
As an Uber passenger, I want to know an estimate of my cab fare so that I can pay the amount.
Acceptance Criteria for this story may be:
- The fee is displayed.
2. The fee is calculated.
3. An estimate of the fare while setting up a new ride is displayed.
4. The fare is not displayed for an invalid passenger ID.
While acceptance criteria can be good enough for short-term success in the software life cycle, product decisions should be driven by user feedback and data.
Conclusion
User stories can help you empathize with a user and fully understand the problem you’re trying to solve. A user story is a small tool that greatly impacts your end product when used effectively.
