121: From Strategy to Delivery

Strategies for Delivery Performance and Maximizing User Stories for Product Development

Welcome to Snippets of Text — Today's snippets are about strategies for organizations to improve delivery performance and reduce time spent remediating security issues. It also touches on first principles thinking, atomic note-taking, and maximizing user stories for effective product development. Let me know what you think in the comments. 

Unrelated: First Principles Thinking and Atomic Note-Taking

First Principles thinking is a powerful problem-solving approach. But it requires a strong foundation in the fundamentals. Taking sequential notes can erase your understanding of these basics. To create more comprehensive notes, aim to connect information and make them as atomic as possible. Disciplines such as biology, chemistry, physics, economics, and history don't indeed exist. Instead, it's all about the universe.

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Off Topic: Maximizing User Stories for Effective Product Development

A story is something that the business values. It's a thin vertical slice through the system's horizontal layers. Quantifying business value can be informal. User Stories make teams focus on how the product behaves, not how it's built. User stories are independent and can be implemented in any order. They should contain only some details of implementation. Those details should be negotiable between developers and the business. A user story must be concrete enough for developers to estimate it and have clear, quantifiable value to the company. A user story should be what one or two developers can implement in a single iteration.

Teams may use different scales to quantify business value. An iteration should contain the same number of stories as there are developers on the team. The most valuable and inexpensive stories will be done first, followed by the valuable but expensive ones. The least valuable and most expensive ones will never be done.

The previous iteration is the best predictor of progress. The project is ongoing until all stories worth implementing are completed. User Stories help delivery teams consider how their products will be used, not how to build them. Refactoring, architecture, and code cleanup are never stories. Identify and describe user segments to ease productive discussion of needs and solutions. Generic user roles can be a way to push in pet features or unjustified scope. A specific user segment must decide whether an answer is correct or unnecessary scope creep. Avoid '* as a user*' statements and generic customer segment descriptions.

Precise and accurate user roles help identify needs and remove unnecessary complexity. Different departments or areas of focus can help identify helpful user segments. For internal IT or enterprise projects, identify the people using the target system and investigate how work is divided.

[^1]: Fifty Quick Ideas To Improve Your User Stories

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