If you are not sure what a Story Discovery session is about this high level introduction might come in handy.
Userstories mostly come from a PO or the business stakeholders. However it’s extremely valuable to get the insights from the team as well. I always like to ask my devs the following: “With the goal of â{Insert goal here}â in mind: what topics do YOU think we should put on the roadmap? What piece of code or error message in the logs has been bugging you but you did not have/get the time to improve it? What âneglected partâ do you think needs more attention, a better workflow, different config/setup, better logging, more monitoring etcâŚ?
Iâd like to hear it from everyone in the team individually, all experts & disciplines. I donât care if the idea sounds crazy at first. What is important though is that they are mostly within our locus of control.
Even if you are super new to a team and you might not know any of the deeper issues, for sure you have experience from other teams and organizations on how they optimized a certain part/flow/etc.
As a participant and whilst preparing for a Story Discovery session there is absolutely no need to create detailed tickets. Just some high level description (e.g: ‘Solve {whatever} ERROR from the logs’ or ‘Clean up a certain CSS’). What I like to do is to share a Miro link so everyone can store their ideas there already if they want.
During the session each and everyone of the team will get some time to put their topics (on a high level) on the Miro board and we will all have the time to explain in short what it is about and why they think it makes sense to pick it up. We will also have time to then briefly discuss & ask questions.
Then we will t-shirtsize (S/M/L) -> group -> vote -> prioritize the topics. And only after that is done we will start creating tickets -> refine -> plan in sprint -> etc.
The end result of the session would be to work towards a backlog with topics of which we know and agree they add value and we can pick them up one-by-one in a period of a couple of months or whenever the devs have some space in their sprint as we also work on the topics coming from the business stakeholders.