3 Unanswered Questions When Using Technical User Stories

Writing quality user stories is hard.

So, teams get lazy and write "technical" stories.

But technical user stories leave these questions unanswered:

Question #1 – Who is this for?

Technical user stories ignore the specific real-life person who's actually getting value from the system. That means we forget put ourselves in their shoes.

Question #2 – Why are we doing this?

Technical user stories "beg the question" by assuming this work must be done, without clarifying why it should be done. So, you miss the opportunity to understand the purpose of a feature.

Question #3 – How does this fit with everything else?

Technical user stories forget that each piece of work has to fit into the larger system. Which means integrating different "features" becomes painful.

We've all been tempted with writing technical user stories. But they in the end, they prevent you from building the simplest possible thing that could work.