How to have great Conversations, and get the most out of your User Stories
User Stories are about having conversations!
User Stories embrace the vagueness of natural language.
However, they contain a promise to the developers.
The promise to be available to answer questions.
More often than not, this doesn’t work out of the box.
Countless teams who made the switch to user stories use the basic formula but don’t adapt their culture to one of conversation.
Sometimes the developers think they understand a story, and then merrily proceed to build the wrong thing.
Other times, the Product Owner overly defines a story without speaking to the team, making a long list of acceptance criteria leading to tedious and confusing refinement meetings.
In both cases, a cultural shift towards more collaboration and conversations is necessary.
As Product Owners and/or Scrum Masters we need to be the ones to facilitate this shift.
We need to actively engage our developers in conversations about our user stories.
We need to encourage our developers to ask questions at every point during the development process.
We need to collaborate with our developers when defining acceptance criteria.
The most important part is to be available to the team, especially if you are working remotely.
Here are some things you can do to to encourage conversations in your team
🗓️ Share your schedule with your team
Make sure to inform the team about your schedule so they understand when they can call you. Keeping your calendar shared is probably the simplest way to do this. If your schedule is overly full (as unfortunately it is for most of us), try to block some regular time slots where you can take calls from developers.
🧑🏽💻 Sit with your team
If you work in an office, make sure you sit with the development team so you are easy to find and easy to approach.
🗣️ Teach your team
Address any troubles during retrospectives or meetings and make sure everyone understands the process. Educate the team on how User Stories work. Get help from an Agile Coach or Scrum Master when necessary and hold regular story writing workshops together.
📝 Join the next couple of detail plannings
Listen in to how the team talks about stories and see if you can pinpoint misunderstandings help clear them up.
💡Make sure everyone understands the product
Sometimes, especially when working in sprints, teams lose sight of the big picture. As a Product Owner it is your responsibility to make sure everyone on the team understands the product and knows how everything works.
👩🏻⚕️Introduce your team to domain experts
If you work in a complicated domain, you can’t be expected to know everything. Make sure you have experts available from the customer side to answer any questions which may arise. Preferably someone you can call at any time. If it takes weeks to get an answer this is going to be way to slow.
