The Importance of Building User Stories as a Team
We believe the best solutions come from working together. Collaboration is at the heart of everything we do, including striving for full team discovery. We value diverse perspectives and open communication to achieve the best outcomes, and by working together to plan our work, we can deliver optimal solutions through shared understanding and clarity.
Why Write User Stories Together?
If you have read our other posts, there is a deep trend in our belief that Engineers and Designers Belong in Decision Making. Designers and developers can bring many insights to discussions about features, difficulty levels, and many facets to a solution’s approach. The discussions produced when plotting user stories end up more important than the exact language captured in any given story.
Beyond creating good conversation that leads to shared understanding, there are many other benefits to planning work collaboratively. User stories tend to be easier to estimate and prioritize in nature, especially when your team can address the effort level to develop them as they are defined. Many stories will be related, and sprints will start to reveal themselves as prioritization gets smoothed out. By keeping stories small and well-defined, the work is much more predictable and sustainable.
By working together on our planned approach, teams can work more iteratively, allowing for faster feedback loops and more frequent deployments. Keeping stories focused and deferring details to additional stories allow for fast work that can improve over time, be easily tackled, or reprioritized if under time constraints. This allows developers and business owners to compromise quickly and efficiently.
User stories ultimately are placeholders for conversations. When documentation becomes the primary means of communication, important details become lost, and innovation or easy wins (e.g. considering UX) get left behind and are harder to reintroduce to the fold. When a team works together to build stories and discussion topics, the conversation can include all of the necessary perspectives to deliver a high quality feature.