Team Writing Own Sprint Stories: Stakeholder Push Back

I started an initiative in 2021 was to have the team start writing their own sprint stories - the series starts here

When I drove the change to have the team write their own stories instead of me - I did this without consulting project stakeholders.

I took the approach:

It’s easier to ask for forgiveness than permission.

In a way, the team’s output is my output and this change would be improving the team’s output because the team is deciding their output!

Win-win!

Or so I thought. 😒

There was stakeholder push back on this course of action.

• “Why aren’t you writing stories?!”
• “If you’re not writing stories, who is?!”
• “How will anything get done??”

These are valid statements, but one thing I learned before:

Results trump everything else.

So I had to make sure the team delivers results using this new method. 😅

I had to reframe work the first sprints so the team did feel they were delivering.