4 Steps to Set an Epic Theme Without Being Overly Complex
By: Hajime Estanislao, PMP, CSM; Editor: Geram Lompon; Reviewed by: Dr. Michael J. Shick, MSPM, PMP, CSM
Are your projects getting stuck in the weeds with too much complexity and little focus? Many teams struggle to manage large, complex projects that span multiple sprints while keeping everyone aligned on the same goals. Without the right approach, it is easy to lose direction, causing delays and missed opportunities.
Epics and user stories are essential tools in Agile project management. They help teams manage complex projects by breaking down big-picture objectives into smaller, actionable tasks.
Epics capture broad goals that span multiple sprints, providing structure and clarity. These larger objectives are divided into user stories representing specific tasks or deliverables. This breakdown ensures the team stays focused on delivering value incrementally throughout the project.
Together, epics and user stories help maintain team alignment, promote clarity, and drive continuous progress, even in complex, multi-phase projects.
Imagine an aligned project team with clarity in priorities and progress visible every step of the way. With agile epics guiding the overarching vision and user stories and breaking down the work into actionable tasks, you can achieve just that.
It is about streamlining your process while ensuring each sprint moves you closer to achieving your business objectives.
Start incorporating epics and user stories into your Agile processes. They will help your agile team stay organized, prioritize effectively, and deliver results that matter.
What is an Epic?
In Agile, an epic refers to a large, high-level body of work that is too big to be completed within a single sprint. It represents a significant objective defined into smaller, manageable components called user stories.
These smaller user stories can then be worked on in multiple sprints, allowing incremental progress while keeping the team aligned with long-term goals. Epics help teams organize complex work while maintaining agility and flexibility in the planning and execution.
Epics are commonly used in Agile teams to manage larger goals. They provide structure to complex projects while ensuring that each iteration delivers value.
How an Epic Theme Governs Your Project?
An epic theme is an overarching guide that shapes and directs the work done throughout a project. It provides a unifying narrative that ties together user stories and technical tasks, ensuring the development effort focuses on achieving broader business objectives.
The theme sets the vision for a large user story within the epic, and every user story must align with this vision to deliver cohesive and meaningful results.
Epic themes act like a strategic compass for the project, giving teams a clear direction and keeping the work organized. By grouping multiple user stories’ desired functionality under a shared theme, teams ensure that every functionality delivered contributes to the larger goal. It helps maintain alignment across multiple teams and sprints, making it easier to manage complex projects while ensuring all tasks drive toward the same objective.
Having a well-defined theme simplifies decision-making and prioritization of product backlog. Since the theme clarifies the purpose and expected desired outcome, teams can prioritize user stories based on their importance to the overall objective.
This governance ensures development efforts are well-coordinated and allows for flexibility, as the theme provides room for adjustments while keeping the broader goals in focus.
Reasons You Need to Have an Overarching Theme for Your Epics and Multiple User Stories
An overarching theme for your epics is essential for maintaining focus, ensuring alignment with long-term goals, and providing clarity throughout the process. By giving the story of your epics a strategic theme, you create a roadmap that keeps tasks and user stories aligned with the larger objectives, ensuring that every piece of work contributes to delivering value.
Epics improve coordination across teams, help prioritize tasks, and maintain a clear vision for the entire project.
- An epic theme is a guiding framework that provides direction and ensures tasks and user stories align with the broader business goals. Use a simple user story format to avoid unnecessary details and confusion.
- Improves Focus and Prioritization: With a clear theme, teams can prioritize work more effectively, focusing on tasks that directly contribute to the project’s long-term objectives.
- Enhances Team Alignment: Themes help cross-functional teams stay coordinated by providing a shared understanding of the project’s purpose.
- Facilitates Decision-Making: Themes simplify decision-making by providing context for what is essential to the epic’s success.
- Supports Incremental Progress: Even with flexibility and ongoing adjustments, an overarching theme keeps the project moving toward a unified goal.
Step-by-Step Instructions to Set an Epic Theme
Setting an epic theme is a strategic process that involves aligning your broader project goals with actionable user stories and tasks. By defining a clear theme, you give your whole development team direction and ensure all the work contributes to a unified objective. Here is a process for setting an agile epic theme to keep your project focused, organized, and adaptable.
- Define the Strategic Vision
- Identify Core Objectives
- Craft a Clear and Simple Theme
- Align with User Stories and Metrics
1. Define the Strategic Vision
Understand your project’s high-level strategic goals. The epic theme should reflect a significant business goal, product vision, or customer need. This vision should be broad enough to allow flexibility but specific enough to guide the epic. Meet with stakeholders, product owners, and team leads to name agile themes and gather insights on the most pressing objectives the epic will tackle.
2. Identify Core Objectives
Break down the strategic vision into specific core objectives that the epic will address. These objectives will serve as the foundation for the epic theme. Identify the most important outcomes you need to achieve, such as enhancing user experience, improving performance, or introducing a new feature. These objectives ensure the epic theme stays actionable and relevant to the business and user’s needs.
3. Craft a Clear and Simple Theme
With the core objectives in mind, create a concise and straightforward theme. The theme should act as a ‘North Star’ for your project, helping the team stay aligned. Use simple, non-technical language to ensure the theme is understood across teams.
For example, the label ‘Enhance User Engagement on Mobile’ might serve as the theme for an epic to improve mobile app performance and user retention.
4. Align with User Stories and Metrics
Ensure the theme aligns with user stories and measurable outcomes. Break the epic down into user stories directly contributing to the theme, ensuring each user story delivers tangible value. Additionally, define key metrics to track the success, such as user engagement rates, performance improvements, or business growth. This alignment guarantees the epic theme stays relevant and measurable throughout the project lifecycle.
Considerations For Successfully Setting Up the Guardrails
When setting up guardrails around your epic theme, it is relevant to maintain a balance between flexibility and structure. While the theme should provide overarching guidance, it shouldn’t be so rigid that it stifles innovation or limits adaptability. Allow room for the team to pivot if new insights or customer feedback emerge during the project lifecycle.
Another insight is the continuous alignment between the epic theme and the user stories. Regularly revisit the theme during sprint planning and reviews to ensure it remains relevant and that the user stories still contribute to the overarching goals. If the theme or objectives evolve, adjust the particular user story maps to avoid misaligned efforts.
Collaboration is paramount when setting the theme vs. up guardrails. Engage cross-functional teams to provide input on the feasibility of the theme, the accuracy of metrics, and how well individual user stories contribute to the epic’s success. It helps ensure the theme remains actionable and meaningful across aspects of the project.
How to Enhance User Stories
Improving user stories goes beyond just writing them effectively; it involves active collaboration with the project team, stakeholders, and customers. Engaging relevant parties helps ensure smaller stories reflect the user’s needs, business goals, and technical feasibility. By continuously gathering feedback from stakeholders and customers, teams can refine and update user stories to ensure they provide maximum value.
Regular collaboration between development teams and stakeholders ensures user stories align with project objectives and user expectations. Conducting user story mapping sessions, where the team lays out and organizes small user stories, allows for a shared understanding and ensures everyone aligns on the scope and priorities. Moreover, involving customers early often helps refine acceptance criteria and makes user stories directly address real user needs, leading to better outcomes.
Utilizing feedback loops during sprints, where stakeholders and customers review delivered features, allows for agile development and continuous enhancement. This collaborative approach helps refine user stories’ complex features over time, making them more targeted and actionable and ensuring that they deliver real business value.
Final Thoughts: Epics and User Stories
Understanding and effectively utilizing epics and user stories is fundamental to managing complex projects in Agile environments. Epics provide a high-level view of your project, guiding it toward strategic goals, while user stories break down the epic into manageable, actionable tasks. Together, they enable teams to stay focused on long-term objectives while delivering value incrementally.
Being aware of how epics and user stories align and the role an overarching theme plays for a particular story in guiding their execution ensures that every part of the project contributes meaningfully to the broader goal.
You can refine and enhance user stories by leveraging collaboration with stakeholders and customers to align them with real user needs and business outcomes. Mastering epics and writing user stories together leads to better
References
Aha. (2024). Themes, epics, stories, and tasks. Aha. Retrieved October 2024, from https://www.aha.io/roadmapping/guide/agile/themes-vs-epics-vs-stories-vs-tasks
Gowland, M. (2023, May). Tell user stories with Agile epics (examples and how-to). Notion. Retrieved from https://www.notion.so/blog/agile-epics-examples
ProductGo. (2024). Understanding epics, user stories, and their differences. ProductGo. Retrieved October 2024, from https://userstorymap.io/epics-user-stories/
Rehkopf, M. (2024). Stories, epics, and initiatives. Atlassian. Retrieved October 2024, from https://www.atlassian.com/agile/project-management/epics-stories-themes
Thakkar, B. (2022, July 21). What is an epic in agile? Complete guide with examples. LogRocket. Retrieved from https://blog.logrocket.com/product-management/what-is-an-epic-in-agile-guide-examples/