Member-only story
How to write great user stories that empower your teams
In part ten of this series, I want to provide a framework for writing great user stories— as a new or aspiring product manager. User stories are the language you use to communicate with your design and engineering teams. Here is the previous post from this series.
Later on, I will present a user story that will solve a problem for a product that you know about: TikTok.
An empowered “product team is assigned problems to solve, and the product team is empowered to discover a solution that is valuable, usable, feasible and viable” — Marty Cagan, Silicon Valley Product Group (Source).
Writing a great user story empowers your teams. Organizations have their product or engineering teams write user stories. It is an important skill to know, so that you can be adaptable to any startup or company that you go to. And if you decide to become a founder one day, it will be immensely valuable to set a stellar foundation for product execution.
1. What makes a great user story?
After reading several articles and learning from different PMs, I want to tell you about a few core principles that can make a user story great. This framework can you give the foundation to write user stories that empower your teams.
- Focus on the customer problem.
- Tell a story (add context).
- Talk about why it’s important for the bigger picture strategy — how does it impact overall product strategy, revenue, and growth?
- Paint the picture (attach a link to your design — ex Figma). Add clarity through words.
- Write clearly. Write succinctly.
- Empower your teams to execute — trust them to solve the problem in the way they can. You don’t need to write everything.
When you’re going over user stories, you should focus on the problem the end user is having and the vision you have for the solution. People learn through hearing, visuals, and reading. They read the user story. You must go over the design in Figma visually and walk through it…
