How to Write Technical User Stories That Deliver Value to Your Customers

Have you ever struggled with writing technical user stories that capture the value of your work and align with your product vision? Many agile teams face the challenge of translating technical tasks into user stories that are clear, concise, and customer-centric.

In this blog post, I’ll show you how to use the classic traditional user story format to transform your technical tasks into something more meaningful — a value-based high performing Technical User Story format.

By following this simple technique, you’ll be able to write user stories that communicate the business value of your work, prioritize your backlog effectively, and deliver value to your customers faster.

The Traditional User Story Format First, let’s look at how effective user stories are by breaking down my favourite and most highly used user story format: the Role-Feature-Reason method.

As a [type of user] I want [some feature] so that [some reason].

This is the Role-Feature-Reason technique, it is the benchmark for all good user stories. It helps you gain and keep the focus on what is important: the business goal. The short sentence structure keeps the focus on the who, what, and why.

By focusing on the who, what, and why, the development team is empowered to find the best technical solution.

Writing Technical User Stories

There could be times where you or your product owner may want to write a Technical Task into a User Story to help quantify the business value of it. However, as you know of user stories — they are written for people to achieve something of value.

So how can you do this for technical tasks?

Many people write technical stories where the who is a piece of technology or something a technical resource needs to do for the product.

Some of this is normal, especially to avoid incurring large amounts of technical debt. With these Technical User Stories, there are a few key guidelines to keep in mind.

Technical User Story Guidelines

• The Product Owner must prioritize Technical User Stories, so the story is written with an understanding of why it’s valuable. To do this, re-frame Technical Tasks into a User Story that still shows the business value.
• Product Owners along with the Scrum Masters should then ask the team why they feel the specific Technical User Story is so important. Have this dialogue and get to an understanding of its value.
• Value must always be the driver.

I recommend using the following examples to write an effective user story focused on value.

Examples you could have simple and effective Technical User Stories that are value-based (the what and why), such as:

Short versions

• We need to refactor the Acme sub-system using abc pattern to improve robustness
• We need to create an enterprise service bus for communication between components to reduce coupling.

Longer versions

To the more detailed Technical User Story that provides more context with value (who, why and what):

• In order to increase the Acme app’s user capacity to over a thousand users we need to upgrade the database. This allows the product owner to actually prioritize how important this is in the context of other business priorities even though it’s a technical task.

For both the short and longer versions you should include an Acceptance Criteria along with listing any risks assumptions success goals and other technical notes within the user story description or notes.

As you can see having a value focus — even technical tasks can be transformed into high priority valued items easily using this technique.

Technical User Story Recipe Tips

To recap, here are some tips to help you write technical user stories that deliver value to your customers:

• Contain no users. Simply think of the goal you are trying to achieve and the value of that goal.
• Use the “I want… so that…” format to express the what and why of your technical task.
• Include an Acceptance Criteria and other relevant details to clarify the scope and expectations of your technical user story.
• Have a dialogue with your product owner and scrum master to prioritize and validate your technical user stories.

Key Takeaways

Communicating and writing user stories is a key skill that helps product owners keep value top of mind and communicate it from a user perspective to the team.

These tips should help you create user stories that generate great dialogue and move your team forward.

Although it may not suit all environments as you and your team develop and mature through your agile journey and gain confidence try this technique out!

I hope you found this blog post helpful and informative. If you did, please share it with your friends and colleagues who might benefit from it.

If you have any questions or feedback, please leave a comment below. I’d love to hear from you.

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