I stopped writing user stories
With agentic coding, user stories frustrate engineers. Replace them with an intent brief and steer by examining the working software.
Context
Your development team has shifted to agentic coding, and it’s unclear where the boundaries between PM work and dev work should sit. Stories are a point of contention. It seems like you should be able to automate user story generation, but when you try this, the stories come out with weird detail and the engineers dislike working with them.
Discussion
Some decades back I drove up Sunshine Canyon in the foothills west of Boulder, Colorado. Two engineers had quit their jobs in medtech and needed help with their startup. They saw a chance to build better software to help doctors measure lung capacity with a device called a spirometer. The two of them had some savings - enough to get started, but not enough that they could afford to waste time. They felt PHP was the way of the future (yes, that PHP, the one an AI model recently found a massive hole in) and as I was an expert in this, they invited me to meet them at a house perched among the rocks and spruce trees to guide them to get started.
Together, we took apart the problem, wrote down user stories on index cards, arranged them on a table, and worked out what was the smallest possible product increment we could use to start testing with real people.
I'd been using this method for a number of years already, and it was something I loved doing and teaching. Taking an idea, breaking it down, and rearranging the pieces has been an essential part of my entire career. Especially the prioritization, in forced rank order: this felt like the most essential task of a product manager.
It used to be that every story cost real money - at least a day or so of someone's time to implement, and often a couple of days. This meant it was important to be careful and avoid building unnecessary things in order to manage costs and move quickly. Also, people hate building things that aren't used; it's depressing.
So user stories have been a core part of the agile playbook for decades, and a few plays here touch on them: Story Mapping, Triage Prioritization
Are User Stories Over?
But generative models are changing the constraints of software. Now Claude can implement a story in minutes.