Demo: Drafting Epic User Stories

In this video, we’re going to looking at drafting epic, agile user stories. As we discussed previously, we want these to follow from problem scenarios. Which are real needs, jobs, desires that exist on the part of the customer that we’ve gone out and researched, or at least made assumptions about. So what I recommend doing is, you’ve presumably already drafted some problem scenarios, I recommend organizing your epic user stories underneath those problem scenarios. So what you can do is right here, we know we have a problem scenario for instance about Prepping Tech’s for Jobs. And we don’t need to rewrite the whole problem scenario. But what we can do is we’ll want to make this an H3.

because we’re going to put a bunch of agile user stories under this. And then what we’ll do is we’ll link this back to the original description of that problem scenario for anybody who wants to see it. So you can go do that by right-clicking or double-clicking and going to Link, or just pressing Ctrl+K. And then you’ll see a list of all your bookmarks and headings here. We added a bookmark to the problems scenarios, that’s just under Insert bookmark. And if we did that above, we’ll be able to refer to it here, so that as our collaborators are curious about what we mean by this problem scenario, they can go and look.

Now our first story here was something like, As Trent the Technician, I want to arrive at my next job prepared, so that I know what needs to be done and the customer doesn’t have to repeat themselves. Now we may find that there’s other epics here, and in the next video, what we’ll do is detail those out with child stories using this table that you see here below.

Okay, let’s do one more so we make sure we’re comfortable with this. We know there’s a problem scenario about getting parts onsite. We’ll just call it Getting Parts Onsite. We will go here, make this an H3, and we’ll go and we’ll also link it back to the original problem scenario, but I’m going to skip that step here. And our epic story here is something like, As Trent the HVAC technician, I want to identify a part that needs replacing, so I can decide on my next steps0 for the job. Okay, in this video, we’ve looked at how to keep your problem scenarios and your epic user stories tied together and organized.

In the next video, we’re going to step back with these epics and storyboard them, so that we’re not just sitting here writing stuff but we’re being really thoughtful about the narrative for these epics and all of the little details that may be valuable to our user.