How I Use the Backlog To Promote Ideas from Roadmap to User Stories

A sample Epics Report in Pivotal Tracker; your epics would be whatever milestones you want to achieve.

When it comes to the flow of ideas from the product roadmap to user stories, I use epics in the backlog as my roadmap rather than a separate document or tool. My philosophy of late uses a few axioms:

• The product roadmap belongs to the business.
• The product backlog belongs to the users.
• Both must contain desired outcomes.*
• Epics bridge the gap between the business and its users.
• Delivering desired outcomes equals delivering value.
• An epic must have a beginning, middle, and end — it is a story of stories.

Corollaries are as follows:

• Business outcomes on the roadmap reflect business value.
• User stories on the backlog reflect user value.
• Epics in the backlog reflect aligned value.
• Given all user stories have user value, when all intended value delivery reflects current business prioritization, then all user stories in the backlog must belong to epics.

I also hold a couple premises:

• If you struggle to bridge the gap between business and user outcomes, the business is not aligned to its users.
• If the business is not aligned to its users, it must either change its direction to match users or find different users to match its direction.

I use the epics column in Pivotal Tracker to illustrate and prioritize business outcomes, prioritized from top to bottom. It also reminds my team what the priority actually is.† I aim for every feature to belong to an epic, or I question that feature’s aligned value.

* I define desired outcome as “a change in conditions that brings value.” Conditions means “the factors or prevailing situation influencing the performance or outcome of a process.” You can more specifically apply this to various stakeholders as “a change in conditions that brings <stakeholder> value,” or “a change in conditions that brings value to <stakeholder-type>.” There has been discussion about outcomes over output, including my responses here and here (follow the chain upward). I use both outcomes and desired outcomes equally, but the latter is what I mean specifically.

† From Greg McKeown’s Essentialism: The Disciplined Pursuit of Less:
“The word priority came into the English language in the 1400s. It was singular. It meant the very first or prior thing. It stayed singular for the next 500 years. Only in the 1900s did we pluralize the term and start talking about priorities.”