My manager's playbook - My view on technical stories

Through my technical advisor side activity, I am helping a big organization (300+ software engineers) in the middle of reorganizing their teams.

While I admit that this is a minor topic inside this significant reorganization endeavor, I want to write today about the fact that they are using technical stories. Technical stories are not a good way of achieving the technical requirements of software for many reasons that I will describe in this article.

Technical stories differentiate technical value from user value. In case of short timing on the project, the Product Manager, who I recall defines “what” the team is doing in a product team, will very likely prioritize user value at the expense of technical value. Technical debt will grow faster than expected.

In this article, we are going to cover the following:

• Why using technical stories is a bad idea?

  • Weakened technical leadership

  • Imbalanced technical leader

  • Loss of productivity

• What should we do instead?

  • Manage essential and accidental complexities

  • Increase technical leadership

  • Improve Product / Tech leaders’ collaboration

  • Ensure that user stories are about user needs, not solutions

  • Make your tech team take responsibility

• Conclusion

• Exceptions to this conclusion