Crafting High Impact Epics and Stories
Master the skills to write delightful epics and stories that deliver customer benefit and align with organizational goals
Workshop description
In today\’s competitive environment, writing effective epics and stories is essential for driving business value, strengthening collaboration, aligning teams, and ensuring every increment of work delivers timely, meaningful customer benefits.
This hands-on workshop guides participants through creating and refining epics and user stories that directly align work with organizational, program, and team goals. You’ll learn how to break down strategic initiatives into actionable epics and stories, capture true customer needs, estimate and size intelligently, apply the MINVEST criteria to ensure completeness, and consistently deliver customer value.
Through real-time exercises using your actual backlog, not examples, you’ll produce clear, stronger epics and stories that enhance alignment, clarity, and value delivery.
Who should attend
- Teams responsible for epic and story creation and estimation, including:
- All team members, i.e. anyone who completes tasks / stories for the team
- Anyone responsible for the product, technical, design, and other functional areas of the team, e.g. Product Owner, Technical Owner
- Person responsible for the agility of the team, e.g. Agility Owner or Scrum Master
- Anyone else who assists the team with creation of high quality epics and stories
This workshop is for you if your team wants to
- Deliver product increments your customers truly value
- Improve speed and predictability in story delivery
- Increase the accuracy and confidence of your story estimates
- Ensure your stories clearly align with organizational and team goals
- Establish specific metrics to measure progress and success
- Navigate complex, interdependent work across teams more effectively
- Strike the right balance of detail in your stories
- Eliminate rework, defect escapes and improve overall quality
What you will apply with your team
- Understand the differences between initiatives, epics and user stories, and the required elements of each
- Create real-world MINVEST criteria epics and stories that you will deliver
- Apply effective techniques that ensure stories contain all required elements including reliable effort and benefit estimates
- Practice splitting epics and stories to more optimal sizes
Workshop details
Agility time horizons and altitudes
We will review how initiatives, epics and stories relate to the agility time horizon and alignment with organizational levels
Initiatives
We will review the required elements of a high quality initiative and explore these with one of your initiatives
Epics
We will review the required elements of a high quality MINVEST epic and create or refine an epic in support of your initiative
User stories
We will examine the required elements of high quality user stories, create and validate MINVEST-ready stories for your epic(s)
Splitting patterns
We will look at splitting patterns and then apply them to your epics and stories. We will also examine some anti-patterns to avoid
What attendees are saying
Still have questions?
Check out the FAQs.
This workshop addresses common issues such as unclear requirements, oversized stories, misalignment between teams, and excessive rework. By improving how teams define customer problems and write actionable epics and stories, it helps accelerate delivery, reduce ambiguity, and improve outcomes.
Yes. In fact, that’s the intent. We encourage teams to bring their own backlog items – epics, user stories, or problem statements – so the exercises focus on real work. This ensures the workshop delivers immediate, practical value and helps teams make progress on actual product challenges while learning new techniques.
Maximum attendees for this workshop is 12. Note that this workshop is Agility team based. We encourage the entire team to attend as a unit.