As a product manager, you need to translate your product strategy and vision into clear, actionable work items for your development team. This requires writing effective product requirements, breaking down initiatives into epics, user stories, features, and tasks that guide development in an agile and iterative way. Crafting these well is key to aligning your team and delivering successful products.
In this guide, I’ll cover what is involved in writing effective product requirements, including an overview of the key components: Epics, User stories, Features, and Tasks, how they relate to each other, and best practices for writing them effectively, and provide examples across a sample product roadmap for a ridesharing app.
Epics – High-Level Initiatives Anchoring Your Roadmap
What are Epics?
Epics provide an overarching narrative and anchor for the initiatives on your product roadmap. They encompass a significant body of work that delivers value to users. Epics group related user stories or features together towards a common objective that furthers your product strategy.
As a product manager, you’ll define epics early when formulating your product plans and roadmap. Well-defined epics allow you and your team to envisage the big-picture vision while also understanding how individual initiatives contribute toward that vision.
Key Attributes of Epics:
- Strategic objective related to business goals
- Can span multiple sprints or quarters
- Group-related stories/features driving toward a goal
- Help organize and structure the product roadmap
- Guide strategic planning and prioritization
Examples of epics might include:
Ridesharing App Epics:
- Implement a dynamic pricing model
- Enable in-app tipping
- Launch ridesharing carpool service
The dynamic pricing epic would have related stories like adjusting base pricing, incorporating demand factors, applying surge pricing, and showing price transparency to users.
Writing Effective Epics
Here are some key tips for writing epics that successfully align your team and anchor strategic product planning:
- Link epics to overarching product or company goals
- Frame the objective and desired business or user outcome
- Focus on the ‘why’ over exact implementation details
- Use simple, descriptive titles that communicate the essence
- Avoid technical jargon when possible
- Consider both user and business goals
- Leave room for flexibility in underlying stories
Let’s see an example epic from our ridesharing app:
Enable In-App Tipping
Objective: Enable riders to tip drivers easily within the app to improve driver satisfaction and retention.
This epic clearly communicates the context and intended impact in simple terms. The technical details and numerous user stories required to design, build, test, and rollout tipping would fall underneath this overarching epic.
User Stories – Functional Requirements from Users’ POV
What are User Stories?
User stories articulate product functionality from an end-user perspective. They capture a discrete action the user wants to take or a need the user has that your product will address. The emphasis is on the who, what, and why over the how, focusing on the user’s motivations and goals vs technical specifications.
As a product manager, clearly defined user stories help you connect business objectives to meaningful user outcomes. They allow you to capture actions and tasks your users want to accomplish with your product. Your development team then understands the context behind implementation requirements.
Key Attributes of User Stories:
- Short sentences from the user’s perspective
- Capture goal/need and reason why it’s important
- Often formatted as follows:
- As a [user type], I want [action/task], so that [value or benefit]
- Focus on what over how
- Basis for discussions between product, design, and engineering
- Directly tied to acceptance criteria and tests
For our ridesharing example, user stories under the enable in-app tipping epic could include:
As a rider, I want to set default tipping percentages in the app, so I can quickly apply a tip without doing math at the end of each ride.
As a rider, I want to optionally add a tip after rating a ride, so I can recognize great service without the awkwardness of cash tips.
This grounds the implementation details in actual rider behaviors, motivations, and values.
Writing Impactful User Stories
Follow these guidelines for crafting user stories that translate vision into functionality:
- Define the user persona and their goal first
- Focus on the value to the end-user
- Use the established As a [ ], I want [ ], so that [ ] framework when possible
- Avoid technical detail – focus on the what over how
- Consider including acceptance criteria to guide development
- Prioritize user stories together with stakeholders
- Revisit and refine stories together with design and engineering
Let’s look at an example with more detail:
Title: Add Default Tipping Percentages
As an app user riding frequently,
I want to save default tip percentages in the app settings,
So I can quickly apply a tip to thank great drivers without calculating each time.
Acceptance Criteria:
- App should save user-selected defaults (15%, 20%, 25%)
- Defaults are available for one tap applied on the tipping screen
- Users can update defaults anytime in the Payment settings
Outlining the user perspective, desire, and expected benefit frames the value. Acceptance criteria provide just enough specification for the development team without being overly prescriptive.
Prioritized user stories aligned to strategic epics enable agile product development and the iterative delivery of functional value to users.
Features – Functional Capabilities Expanding Your Product
What are Features?
A feature encompasses a capability your product delivers to meet user needs. While user stories capture a specific user action or task, a feature is the actual functionality enabling those actions in your product. Features bring stories to life. They involve multiple user workflows and UI/UX design considerations.
Whereas stories focus on discrete jobs individual users want to accomplish, features enable those jobs while expanding and enhancing your product as a whole. Expanding tipping capabilities could be considered a new feature. Dynamic pricing would also be a product-level feature encompassing many stories.
Key Attributes of Features:
- Represents functional capabilities expanding product value
- Brings user stories to life via multiple workflows/UI
- Often involves design visuals and technical specifications
- Requires collaboration across teams
- Links technology implementation to user value
- Introduces broader capabilities vs. singular user tasks
In our ridesharing app example, we could have an Android Pay Integration feature made up of:
Stories:
As a rider, I want to save my Android Pay cards for quick checkout
As a rider, I want exclusive discounts when paying with Android Pay
This feature delivers broader payment capabilities and expanded value to users vs. individual user tasks.
Defining Robust Features
Follow these tips for crafting well-scoped features tied directly to delivering functional benefits:
- Define features in terms of business and user value
- Consider multiple supporting user stories and needs
- Clarify required workflows and UI/UX adjustments
- Detail the main functionality the feature will enable
- Specify performance and technical requirements
- Confirm acceptance testing steps and metrics
Our Android Pay example outlines relevant parameters:
Title: Integrate Android Pay
Overview: Integrate Android Pay wallet support so riders can quickly access and pay with stored cards while driving increased engagement via exclusive discounts for Android Pay users.
Main Workflows:
- Save Cards
- Auto-prompt users to add cards after the first ride
- Secure Checkout with stored cards
- Apply a 10% discount on rides for Android Pay users
Acceptance Criteria:
- Android Pay SDK implemented
- End-to-end user flows tested
- 10% discount reflected in receipts when using Android Pay
This level of specification ensures alignment across teams on exactly what will be delivered and how it will work.
Tasks – Technical Implementation Assignments
What are Tasks?
Tasks capture the actual development assignments that need to be completed to bring user stories and features to technical life based on specifications. They are technical sub-components assigned to developers/engineers as implementation work items, specifically within a sprint workflow.
Whereas stories, features, and epics track the business, user, and overarching product planning, tasks focus solely on the hands-on work needing completion within a specific development cycle to deliver functional software.
Key Attributes of Tasks:
- Technical sub-components of broader user stories/features
- Direct to-do items assigned to engineers
- Have owners and due dates
- Completed as part of development sprints
- Facilitate software construction and necessary revisions
In our Android Pay example, related tasks would be:
Task 1: Integrate Android Pay SDK
Task 2: Create design mock-ups for checkout workflow
Task 3: Build a card storage database model
Task 4: Code discount calculation logic
Tracking tasks gives deeper technical visibility and focuses developer work within sprints, facilitating agile execution.
Creating Tasks to Enable Execution
Follow these key principles when defining tasks for your engineers:
- Create tasks from the breakdown of broader stories/features
- Frame tasks as assignments rather than requests with owners
- Add due dates fitting within the relevant sprint schedule
- Consider if task dependencies require sequencing
- Specify both development and testing tasks needed
- Ensure clarity but avoid micromanaging engineers
- Facilitate completion tracking and surfacing of potential issues
With well-scoped tasks tied to user stories and features, you’ll enable focused execution.
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Conclusion – Working Together to Deliver Value
You now have an overview of epics, user stories, features, and tasks, including what each element represents, how to craft them effectively, and their interrelationships that enable product development and delivery from strategic plans to functionality enhancing your product experience.
Writing Effective Product Requirements – Key Takeaways:
- Epics anchor your long-term product roadmap
- User stories capture critical user actions, needs, and motivations that frame requirements
- Features bring together stories to expand capabilities
- Tasks facilitate technical implementation and execution
Getting alignment on these building blocks fuels development velocity and brings your product vision to life incrementally but tangibly. Business strategy transcends to user value via these interconnected work items. Mastering the art of writing effective product requirements and conveying how each piece fits together is core to product leadership. With the templates and guidelines provided throughout this guide, you now know how to connect those dots expertly.