Storytelling Techniques for Better Requirements
Do you struggle with making your ideas clear and understandable to others? Does it annoy you to sit in requirements sessions for hours only to leave with more questions than answers? As human beings, we’re made for storytelling. It is a natural form of communication. So, Jeff Howey suggests that we use some of the same techniques we use talking to friends and family when trying to share our complex ideas and define software requirements. Whether you are a product owner or a traditional business analyst trying to make your approach to requirements more lean and nimble, join Jeff to explore the concept of storytelling. Storytelling is especially powerful when you start by sharing the problem you want to solve and walking through a sequence of specific steps—with the right audience at the right time—to elaborate and clarify the story. The goal of storytelling is to ensure a strong, unbreakable thread of understanding that ties the most specific solution detail back to the real problem and the original story.
A former business analyst who now works as an enterprise agile coach, Jeff Howey spends a significant amount of time coaching executives to articulate strategy in a way real people can understand. Then business and product owners can describe the problems they need to solve, and business analysts and product owners can define short, useful, and focused requirements through conversation and short stories. Above all, Jeff’s desire is to save others from falling into the pit of writing thick, often-ignored, and soul-crushing requirements documentation. You can find some of Jeff’s stories at LeadingAgile.