Hi Andrei Berechet,

Thanks for taking the time to read and respond in depth to what we’ve written.

You may have noticed similar conversations taking place in the comments thread? If not, don’t worry, I’ll explain below.

We’re not condemning User Stories. It’s simply not the motivation behind this piece (although, thanks for picking up on what we hoped was a well crafted title — it appears to have delivered on it’s intended result). The purpose was however to do two things; 1. Highlight the gaps we often see teams making when defining why, what and when they will build something, and 2. Showcase how we go about defining why, what and when we build something, not in excruciating detail, but in enough depth to showcase an actual process exists.

I’ll also say I don’t disagree with what you’ve said. Great teams, providing they are comfortable with their operating framework, can make user stories, job stories or even short stories work for them. But, there are a heck of a lot of teams that don’t operate with this level of efficacy.

We frequently observe a lack of empathy/understanding teams have towards a given situational context. Are User Stories the direct blame for this? Of course not. You, I and many others working in this industry have come to learn that. But, what we’ve observed consistently, is that different methodologies or frameworks can (at times) far better enable a team to highly value, empathise with, and therefore focus on, the situational context. The JTBD framework, whether you add the PWS framework into it or not, as a way of trying to better understand situational context and therefore motivation, is a way to get this stuff out in the open early.

So the long and the short of it is this; we’ve observed Job Stories, when used as part of the JTBD framework, do actually encourage desired product team behaviours (we could probably have a ten page back and forth on what these should be, but lets save that for another time…). To synthesise, we’d say this means valuing highly good user research and User Expereince Design process as core to any product team operations.

Also, the one area I disagree with lots of people on is personas. I do not find them valuable. This is my opinion and there’s a fair bit if substance behind this. Perhaps room for another post entirely…? :)

More to come.