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alistair-fairweather
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We all know the theory...
• Good Stories should be:
• Independent
• Negotiable
• Valuable
• Estimable
• Testable
• ...but in practice it’s often difficult
Product owners as novelists
• Creative
• Passionate
• Perfectionistic
• Constantly on deadline
• Dedicated
• Misunderstood
• Lonely
Product owners as bards
• Creative
• Passionate
• Open to change (“riffing”)
• Live in the moment
• Have perspective
• Seek to understand
• Involve their audience
That makes good stories...
• Conversations...
• Highly malleable...
• Collaborative...
• Good enough...
• ...not manuscripts
• ...not immutable
• ...not solitary
• ...not perfect
That makes good stories...
• A product of understanding...
• Open
• A song that you can sing along to...
• ...not the source of understanding
• ...not self-contained
• ...not a novel that you get lost in
Very pretty – but how do I use it?
• (good) conversations typically aren’t one sided
• Ask your users / customers
• Ask your peers
• Ask your developers
Asking your customers
• Resist the urge to jump straight into features
• Try to find out what their problems are
“It takes so long to load a new order”
“I have trouble finding other bloggers”
“My friends want to comment but they don’t want to have to sign in”
Asking your customers (2)
• Ask as many of them as you can
• Enable them to talk to each other
• Ask them questions in return
– “Would having all the form elements on one page make loading products quicker?”
– “Would enabling search by username help?”
– “Would you like to allow anonymous comments on your blog?”
Asking your peers
• Find out if their customers have similar problems...
• ...and how (if) they solved them
• Use social media:
– Linked.in
– Forums
– Blogs
Asking your developers
• It’s a discussion right from the start
• They may know better (or have better ideas)
• Be prepared to split, combine and scrap at a moment’s notice
• There’s a difference between vague and open
• INVEST is a test, not a starting point
Good stories have...
• Great characters
(user modelling)
• A coherent plot
(product backlog)
• Surprise twists and turns
(inspect and adapt)
Horror stories
• “Create Solution”
• “As a user I want the database optimised”
• “When I publish articles that I’ve re-edited after publishing they don’t get published immediately”
Fairy tales
• “As a user I want an advanced payment gateway that processes payments very fast”
• “As an administrator I want a mobile console that immediately alerts me of any abuse via SMS and lets me block the person’s IP”
Epic poems
• “As an advanced user I want a contact management interface with three buttons: Create, Update and Delete and a list of my contacts with checkboxes, names, email addresses and phone numbers with a sort option for each column”
Good stories...
• “As a reader I want to be able to browse through a blog's archive pages”
• “As an Administrator I want the system to send a registration email to a new user so that their email can be confirmed by way of activating their account”
• “As an author, I want the spell checker to ignore words with numbers so that only truly misspelled words are indicated"
Thanks to: David McLean and Michael James
Scrum is...
• ...a certainty engine
• ...about overcoming fear
• ...eating elephants one bite at a time
• ...about the journey
• Your stories aren’t the maps...
• ...they are the conversations along the way