User Stories
User stories are a format for documenting product requirements that teams write in shorter, smaller iterations—typically for one or two week sprints—as an alternative to long product requirements documents.
How do user stories function as requirements?
User stories serve as a way to communicate what to build to engineering teams. Instead of writing lengthy product requirements documents (PRDs) that might represent months of work, teams write user stories and work in one or two week increments.
This represents an improvement in how teams communicate requirements:
- Traditional approach: Long PRDs documenting months of work
- User stories approach: Shorter requirements for sprint-sized increments
How are user stories used in development backlogs?
Teams prioritize user stories in their development backlog, similar to how they might prioritize opportunities in an opportunity backlog. The backlog contains items the team will build, ordered by priority.
How do user stories fit into discovery work?
Traditionally, teams write user stories to share conclusions from discovery work. The workflow looks like:
1. Run assumption tests or other discovery activities
2. Draw conclusions about what to build
3. Write user stories to communicate those conclusions
However, this creates a handoff between discovery and delivery—teams do discovery work, then document it in user stories for implementation.
Why are teams shifting away from user stories?
In continuous discovery models, teams increasingly use prototypes and discovery artifacts to communicate requirements instead of user stories.
Rather than:
- Interview customers → Create research deck → Write user stories
Teams:
- Interview customers → Create prototypes → Build from prototypes
This approach reduces handoffs and keeps teams working from the actual discovery artifacts rather than translations of that work.
The problem with the traditional approach is that when teams get busy, they skip the documentation step. They end up not showing their work, which leads to lost context and suboptimal decisions.
Learn more:
- Product Managers and Product Owners: What's the Difference?
Related terms:
- Research
- Prototyping
- Solutions
Last Updated: October 25, 2025