User Story

Use the Product Inception Canvas to align with your teammates on what we are building, who they are building it for, why it’s important, and what’s on the initial product backlog. Each one of those initial product backlog items is the title of a User Story, and now is the time to elaborate those initial product backlog items as fully articulated user stories.

A User Story is an agile way to articulate product “requirements.” It’s an invitation to a conversation with your teammates to ensure that we all understand who our stakeholders are, what they want, and why it’s important to them. We tell the user’s story out loud to our teammates, and we ask questions about anything we don’t understand. By retelling user stories, we get on the same page as each other. We gain the ability to tell each user’s story the same way. We get aligned with each other on what we’re going to build, and then we build it really well.

Fill in the blanks on this user story template, and you’ll be on your way to clearly communicating the who, what, and why of your product’s “requirements.”