Introduction to Agile Framework
At Persio, we have an ambitious vision to revolutionize the retail marketing industry by helping retailers maximize revenue through more intelligent promotions.
We also have a group of talented individuals each excelling in their area of expertise. So very early on, we realized that in order to succeed, we needed to combine our vision with the talents of the individuals at Persio, while maintaining the flexibility to accommodate a rapidly changing environment.
I joined Persio as Product Manager just over a year ago, and one of the first things I did was create a framework to achieve this objective. I’ve distilled a year’s worth of learnings into this article with the hope of benefiting other product managers working to achieve a grand vision in a fast-paced industry.
This framework can be used to store and organize product requests into repositories that correspond to your product’s strategy. Once implemented and properly maintained, this approach can help you develop a clearer roadmap and strategy, which will make good product decisioning easier.
To make the most out of this framework, it’s best if your organization has already implemented some variation of the Agile Methodology. If not, this can still be applied to most existing processes with some tweaks.
Enough Talking. Show Me the Money.
Themes, Epics, User Stories
To start, break down any incoming feature requests into three categories — themes, epics, or user stories — using the following suggestions.
Themes are critical building blocks for your product’s strategy. Each theme is usually a statement describing an idea that is critical to the vision of your product. Epics are large features that together makes up a theme. Lastly, user stories are “chewable bits” that together makes up an epic.
To help illustrate the relationship between themes, epics, and user stories and how they can be applied in practice, I’ve included an example of the hierarchy between each item and how they can be written within the context of something we actually built at Persio, our promotion platform.
Telling the Right Story
These categorizations are extremely useful when communicating your product’s strategy to various stakeholders within your organization.
Themes typically describes abstract ideas or concepts critical to your product vision. As a result, they are useful when discussing product strategy with senior management or describing your product at a higher-level without getting into details.
Epics and user stories, on the other hand, should be concrete features or tasks that are useful when explaining and assigning work to designers or engineers. Epics are also useful when describing features to a customer when collecting feedback.
A user story is a description of a functionality written from the perspective of the person requesting the capability. The deliberate structure of a user story is helpful for all parties to understand the desired outcome for a particular audience.
The structure must include:
- The requester’s role
- The desirable outcome once request is delivered
- The benefit to the organization or end-user once the request is delivered
For example: “As a marketer, I want to enter a discount amount so it can be used when creating a discount promotion”
We’ve covered the very basic aspects of the framework, helping you to frame and categorize requests. But without a way to prioritize features, set time-bound goals and manage the expectations of upper management, things can get really messy. To address those topics, stay tuned for Part II, where we’ll cover the critical aspects of planning: Quarterly Objectives and Milestones.
Originally published at the Persio Blog. Alex Hsu is Senior Technical Product Manager at Persio.
