Product Management

Increasing the Effectiveness of Your User Stories

Rameez Kakodker
12 min readOct 8, 2022

Crafting user stories is an art. And like any art, the more you do, the better you’ll get at it. Writing stories in a silo without feedback, from peers, seniors, and the development team alike would be pointless. A circlejerk of one.

Like many art forms, you develop your styles for writing user stories. I’ve seen so many in my experience that it is fascinating to see why those formats work and how they’re implemented.

Aren’t we artists as well? So many ways to craft & communicate your requirements!

Like all art forms, there are certain rules — bendable — but for 90% of the cases, hold. As a product manager, you’re expected to adapt to your team, your product, and your organization (in that order) to craft effective user stories.

I will NOT go into specifics of writing user stories. There are many authors out there who’ve done an excellent job of formulating one (list at the end). Instead, I’ll focus on using the stories you’ve crafted effectively, and how you can improve them if needed.

Note

This article isn’t for beginners — but PMs with 2–5 years of experience. There are a few things a new PM can learn, but it’s best if you get your basics figured out through other articles (I’ll list some at the end).

Definition of a User Story

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Rameez Kakodker

100+ Articles on Product, Design & Tech | Top Writer in Design | Simplifying complexities at Majid Al Futtaim | mendicantbias.com