User Story Workshop for Product Managers

In Agile Product Management , when product owners gets introduced to Scrum frame work, most of the time they have difficulty in transitioning from the detailed requirements world of traditional PMI world to the nebulous world of User Stories that are not really complete. But once they get coached on the fundamentals of what a User Story is and how to write them, their natural skill as a product manager accelerates their expertise on writing effective user stories.

Last week I had such an opportunity to conduct coaching sessions for the product owners in our team on writing effective user stories.

Session One – Introduction to User Stories

I gave the team a general outline of Scrum framework and User Story fundamentals. Check out the Slide Share Presentation of the User Story Introduction.

Introduction To User Stories For Agile Product Development

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Session Two – Writing Effective User Stories Workshop.

User Stories Workshop For Agile Product Development

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Session two, I had the team do some hands-on activities on identifying user roles, building personas, writing essential use cases, splitting user stories.
Session two had lots of fun moments, especially when they played a game called “Avoiding Tunnel Vision” where they learned the need to think out of the box when writing user stories using extreme personalities. Check out some of the fun extreme personalities developed by the Product Owners for a fictional learning portal system (LMS).


Feedback from the Participants.