BA for devs

Product development

Understand your product

• What is this product important?
• Who cares about the product?
• What would be a failure?

User Story mapping

Now let's make a user story map

Buying a t-shirt online

Writing good user stories

• Every system automates a process
• Process worth automating delivers business value
• Business value is specific to persons

INVEST

• Independent
• Negotiable
• Valuable
• Estimable
• Small
• Testable

Users are important

• Segments
• Personas

A persona

Bad stories

• As a user I want to submit feedback
• As Michael I want to log in
• As Michael I want to buy shoes online

Examples

• As platform user I want to know of any overrides that happened within a day so that I can identify and follow up on susupicious ones
• As a marketing analys I want to know user drop out rates per form field so that I can optimize the user journey to improve conversion rate.

Cross-functional requirements

• Usability breakpoint
• Differentiation
• Saturation

Acceptance criteria

• How do we know it worked?
• Non-(necessarily)-automated version of gherkin

Tech tasks

• Controversial
• Totally legitimate
• Not user stories

Prioratization

• A conversation, not a breefing
• Think of value, development and testing
• Maintain hierarchical backlog

When in doubt, use the Force