User Story X

A Very Short, Short Story about Competing Interests in a Tech Startup

HBO’s Silicon Valley show, where art imitates life, and life imitates art.

Somewhere, two-hours away from the expensive rental properties and hipster food joints of Silicon Valley, a tech startup is trying to add a new feature to their Minimum Viable Product (MVP).

Lead Product Manager: Our early adopters prefer to have this X feature available so they can do Y and be productive. Every time we do a demo this is the most asked feature.

Lead Software Developer: We can easily add that as User Story X on the next sprint, its not that complicated, if our early adopters are waiting for it. It will only take 2 to 3 days for me to code it.

Lead DevOps Engineer: I thought our priority on the next sprint is to address address Defect Z?! it caused a 20-minute downtime last week.

Lead Product Manager: Oh yeah, that is still our priority, but we will need to add this User Story X as part of the sprint.

Lead Software Developer: It’s not a problem, I looked into the faulty code, fix is simple, this User Story X will not add further problems.

Lead DevOps Engineer: Ok, as long as it will pass our testing and no issues detected in build system.