Agile Story Writing Workshops - The Boundaries - Mike Cohn

Hi Lee,
This tip continues our series where we go back to the basics of user story writing. This week I want to talk about story writing workshops and boundaries.
Think outside the box. Do you hate that phrase as much as I do?
It’s become another overdone business cliche. But it also bothers me because creativity often comes from thinking inside the box.
I’ve seen this proven time and time again as the difference between a successful story-writing workshop and one that fails to engage participants or to lead to useful insights.
For a successful story-writing workshop, the product owner provides a significant objective as the box or boundary within which meeting participants work. The product owner starts the workshop by saying something like, “We’re here today to think about this subset (or chunk) of our product.”
When a product owner encourages a story-writing workshop to roam freely over the entire product, the participants will likely write a lot of stories but those stories will lack a cohesive purpose. When the product owner instead focuses the meeting on a single, significant objective, participants tend to find more creative and more valuable solutions to the chosen area of the product.
Early in the life of a product, a good significant objective could be on identifying what will be needed to deliver a Minimum Viable Product (MVP).
Later story-writing workshops might then focus on identifying a Minimum Marketable Feature or MMF. This is a chunk of functionality that is big enough to be valuable when released but is a subset of what users need.
An additional benefit of focusing a story-writing workshop on a significant objective like an MVP or MMF is that these workshops can be done less frequently.
I like doing a story-writing workshop about every two to three months. Because my workshops are focused on a significant objective, each workshop identifies enough high value stories that the team does not need to spend much time writing new stories each iteration.
Setting a significant objective is an easy way to succeed with agile,

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