User stories are the backbone of agile’s todo-list-driven development model. Whether you use kanban, scrum, xp, or any hybrid, user stories are the basis for communicating what you want to build to the people who will build it.

I’m not going to talk about how to write a good user story. I mean, I love talking about that, and I’m sure I’ll write a long article about it someday, but for this post I want to take a step back and talk about at how to use them.

What’s in a story?

Most training on user stories tells you to write something like this:

As a [type of user] I can [do something] so that [I can get some value].

That’s a powerful structure. It puts the focus on your users and the value they get out of using the feature you want to build. It narrows your scope to a manageable piece of work that should be (relatively) easy to complete. And it gives you a simple foundation on which...