#Epic meaning in product management how to#

Make it clear and concise to reduce confusion and avoid miscommunication. Name the epic - Naming your epic is one of the easiest ways to align your team with the end goal. These help your team keep working and track how far they’ve progressed.

Set out acceptance criteria - Don’t forget to include a definition of done and milestones. This will ideally contain information that is important from the PM’s perspective. Write a description of the feature’s context - Explain how users will interact with the feature and what problems it will address. This should also include information on any added costs the feature may incur. Your benefit hypothesis represents why you’re making this feature.ĭetermine the business value - Decide what value your business will receive from pursuing the new feature.

#Epic meaning in product management how to#

How to write featuresĭefine benefit hypothesis - The first step of writing a feature is to define your benefit hypothesis or the added value your new feature will bring to users. If you’re struggling, try breaking the process into bite-sized steps. Writing features, stories, and epics is easier than you might think. The epic can’t be completed until each feature, user story, and task has been delivered.īest practices for writing features, stories, and epics Large portions of the overall product come together to form the final deliverable.Įach paragraph would be a user story, smaller parts of the story that build chapters.Įach word would be a task, the essential parts that the book literally could not exist without. The entire story would be classed as an epic as it’s the completed product and is what the user will interact with. To help distinguish each, let’s think of a project as a book. If teams can’t get on the same page, they’re more likely to face problems during development. Using these terms interchangeably can confuse newcomers and make it harder to understand what each term really means. This iterative process is extremely helpful for agile teams because it leaves space for last-minute changes and ensures each part of the product offers maximum value to the user. Before you know it, you have a deliverable product that users will love. Tasks feed into user stories, user stories feed into features and features feed into epics. Heading into your working day knowing you have 1 or 2 tasks to do is much better for morale than heading into another day of slugging away at an epic. task (with examples)īreaking down product development into a more granular process helps teams perform better and reduces the risk of burnout. Stories are broken down into tasks to ensure each aspect of the user story is covered before delivering the feature.Įpic vs.

It tasks the team with thinking about user pain points and how they can maximize value. User stories are not specifications, they’re simply a way to open up a conversation. User stories are most commonly written like this:Īs a, I want, So I They need to be clear and concise so that whoever reads them can easily identify who they’re building for and how they will offer value to the user. User stories are usually found in the product backlog. Within agile frameworks, a user story is the smallest unit of work. It gives context to the team’s actions, letting them know what they’re building, why they’re building it, and how it will create value. Stories aren’t technical specifications, they’re a way of putting the customer at the center of every conversation. You need to be able to respond to last-second changes, report your progress, and also stick to the game plan.Įpics, stories, and features are the perfect tools to use to do this.īefore we understand the differences between each tool, we first need to understand what each represents.Ī story (also referred to as a user story ) is an informal explanation of feature requirements.

When structuring your work, you need to be able to see the largest objectives and how they break down into manageable pieces of work. This is one of the reasons we place so much importance on prioritization. You need to structure your workflow to build a product with maximum value to the customer. Epics, features, and user stories are perfect examples of terms that are often confused. There are a lot of terms you need to familiarize yourself with when working in product management, so it’s not surprising that even the most seasoned of PMs get confused and start using terms interchangeably. Features, stories, and epics are all different elements of the agile process that go into creating a final product.