How to Write a User Story for an Platform Product (As a Platform Product Manager)

You might be super savvy about writing user stories for the sprint team but it’s sometimes dauting tasks if you have to narrow down your focus on Platform Products like API frameworks, DB Upgrade, or CD/CI automation. Ultimately what you are delivering impacts company initiatives and KPIs it matters and it’s your job to align those tasks to be baked, sized and executed and evaluated.

There are key questions you have to ask before you write any user stories for the platform team:

1. Identify who is your audience? Who is consuming your deliverables? If it’s API you are delivering at the end of the day you should write up stories based on your target audience and basically your deliverables should be working APIs along with comprehensive API documentation easily consumable by engineers.
2. Feature outline: First you might want to outline what are the major overview of the feature to be handled via API? For example, if this is about a CMS tool then you might have to consider the following:

POST
— writing contents
— save contents
— preview contents
— preview contents
— publish contents
— delete contents
— update contents
READ
— Read contents

3. Writing user stories: you can pick one of scope of the work from #2 and start writing a user story. The below story is to lay out basic functionality expected from UI layer for writing/saving.

As an editor,

I want to write up a simple content and save it as a draft

So that I can come back and edit and publish later on.

Acceptance Criteria:

[criteria 1]
[criteria 2]

This gives a basic framework what you need to focus on each feature based on a user story. Above story must be done by a front end team Product Manager or if you are in charge of both (front end / customer experience as well as backend / API layer then you might have to write two different story to cover UI and backend API).

As an developer,

I want to call a CMS API to save a content’s attributes

So that I can keep referencing content ID for saving or update or deleting the content in edit mode.

The object of the platform user story is to identify who is the audience (developer, QA, devops, business team, etc) and what is the baseline interaction between a caller and deliverables.

Acceptance Criteria should not be a specification or not too restrictive but inclusive enough to start the tech design.

Acceptance Criteria can be for example,

• Should be able to pass parameters including content title, body, date, content section ID, tagging, associated image ID
• Should be able to return saved content ID and its status code (saved, failed, error msg, error code)

4. Standard Procedure: In user story, please mention also about any standard procedure they have to follow.

If this is about API they need to be following API governance guideline. And if this is about a server upgrade it should include standard patch SOP guide in the acceptance criteria. Plus add any standard test requirements as well related to the backend batch or upgrade.

5. Reference doc: In user story, please reference the overarching specification document if needed including architecture diagram, tech design doc or any specification which helps a developer find useful.

When your user story can’t handle enough contents including charts, diagram or big table you can always build entire tech specs inside the confluence or google docs and reference from the there.

5. Dependency map: In user story, please indicate any technical dependencies you are aware of so that the story points can be factored into as well as create a dependency map ahead of time for stakeholder visibilities.

Conclusion

Platform User Story can be big and it might not be fitting into multiple user stories and then epic should be leveraged for agile practices by providing bite-size chunk good enough for a sprint team to execute in a organized way. Agile is all about bringing value incrementally and I believe if you are able to leverage agile method for your Platform Product journey in efficient way, you can bring great value and success to the organization and enjoy great dividends over the long run.