Colin I’ve been looking for a better, more descriptive way to write stories. The job stories outline is fantastic and the developers I work with will be appreciative as well.

Hi Charles,
Thanks for your comment, we’ll take it under advisement. As for jobs to be done, it’s certainly an interesting framework and I know it’s growing in popularity. We don’t use jobs to be done here (not yet!) but who knows, maybe in the near future we’ll look into it a bit deeper and write another blog post about our experience with it.

Thanks, both of you.

One comment I forgot to make is that part of the reason I rejected the classic formulation is that it’s very difficult not to start anticipating the solution in the middle part. You invariably end up saying something like “As a usertype, I want a menu option that allows me to update my profile”. or something similar…

Love this, Colin. Exactly why it’s not useful to be prescriptive about how to write user stories. That JTBD approach you outlined is fab, and I know our CPO Simon is a big fan of it too.

Thanks for the feedback, Colin!

When a [user] is [in a certain scenario], they need [to have certain things happen], so that they [can achieve a certain outcome].

One example of Alan’s blog is taken from the eBay experience:

A user story might be:

As a buyer, I want to get a notification when a counter bid is made so that I know I must update my own bid.

The corresponding job story is a lot richer:

When a Buyer has already made a bid on an item, they are anxious about missing a counter bid and want to immediately receive counter bid notifications, so they can have enough time to evaluate and update their own bid.