I read a recent article/blog post by Steve Johnson where he made the case for something he calls “market stories”. Here’s a snippet from the post:
Lately I’ve been talking to people about “market stories.” Combined with personas, market stories describe the market problem on an emotional level, before you break it down into product stories and user stories and tasks. They inspire our internal teams to want to help customers as people, not just as buyers.
For example: “My father wandered away from home and we can’t find him.”
Steve makes the case for a story that augments user personas or user roles. I for one love this idea. I believe that the more thinking, and more importantly, envisioning we do for high level product definition—the better we can build truly useful products.
This is exactly the reason I wrote the post not that long ago about reinvesting in personas within our user stories.
I would encourage you to read Steve’s initial post here, and then a follow-up on writing them here.
Sometimes in the agile community, even though we talk a “good game” around customer, value, and solutions, we still focus at too fine a level of granularity and miss the big picture. I believe the more we begin High and move towards the Details, the better we become at truly delighting our customers.
Stay agile my friends,
Bob.