A user story loved by the product team
Remember your time in support, filing a defect or feature request for the product team? How many times your idea was rejected before it made it to the product roadmap. If you can relate to this, keep on reading because I am going to share my experience and how I made peace with some of the amazing product engineers.
Affairs start with one little compromise after another.
Since most of the product teams are cloaked, a customer has no option but to reach out to the support team for all kinds of feedback. This is where the affair starts and compromises are made, leading to denial or acceptance. While the folks in support are amazing at receiving customer feedback, they are not as efficient in creating a user story out of it and I was no exception. It was not until one of the product engineers at Kayako invited me for a pair-support session, I’d learn the importance of a good user story and why the product team needs it so badly.
A good user story covers at least three of the five Ws in a simple and concise way. User stories may follow one of several templates, the most common is the Connextra template, shared below:
As a <role> I can <capability>, so that <receive benefit>another template specifies:
As <who> <when> <where>, I <want> because <why>Using this format will effectively reduce your initial squabbles with the product team by ensuring that your message gets across as clear as possible.
Once you have conquered the tip of the iceberg, it’s time to take a look at the bottom part. Ask the customer and yourself about what caused this event, the cost of delay, and what factors will be influential through the lifecycle of this request. These factors can include things beneath the surface such as preconditions, environment variables, and affected customers. Last but not the least, it is important to validate user stories through a conversation with the end-users to ensure that requirements are correctly understood and communicated to the product team.
Once you get the green light, format your user story using a defined template that fits neatly into agile frameworks like scrum and kanban. It’s this work on user stories that help product teams get better at sprint planning, leading to more accurate forecasting and greater agility. And that’s your recipe to work with any product team in the world and make them fall in love with the customer support again. ❤
