Successful product development requires a bridge between high-level organizational strategy and the daily work of development teams. In the Agile framework, the Epic serves this function, acting as a large container for value that aligns with strategic objectives. Learning to construct an effective Epic is fundamental for translating ambiguous goals into meaningful, executable increments of work. A well-written Epic ensures that every development effort contributes directly to a measurable business outcome. This guide details the necessary preparation, structural components, and ongoing management required to master the Epic writing process.
Defining the Epic in the Agile Framework
An Epic represents a substantial body of work, typically spanning several sprints or even quarters, designed to deliver a specific customer or business value. It functions as a holding mechanism for related, smaller pieces of work, commonly referred to as features or user stories. Within the product hierarchy, Epics sit at a higher level than individual stories but are subordinate to overarching strategic themes or organizational initiatives. This positioning allows the Epic to maintain focus on a large, single objective without needing to specify granular implementation details. The Epic ensures that development teams focus their efforts on the highest-value streams of work, unifying multiple efforts under one strategic umbrella.
Key Steps Before Writing the Epic
Before any documentation begins, the proposed Epic must undergo a strategic justification process to confirm its necessity and value. This preparatory stage involves verifying that the intended scope aligns with the overarching product vision and the company’s current strategic themes. Product managers must develop a clear business case that articulates the anticipated return on investment, detailing how the completed Epic will positively impact defined organizational metrics. Stakeholders must be engaged early to secure alignment on the expected outcomes and confirm the priority of the work relative to other potential initiatives. Answering “Why now?” with a clear articulation of market timing, technical dependencies, or competitive advantage is paramount before committing resources.
Structuring Your Epic: Essential Elements
The actual writing of an Epic requires adherence to a structured format to ensure clarity, shared understanding, and effective communication across teams. Every Epic begins with a concise, descriptive title that clearly communicates the objective, followed by a detailed narrative description. This description often utilizes a standardized user-centric template, such as, “As a [specific user type], I want [a specific goal or capability], so that [a measurable business or user benefit].” This format immediately frames the work in terms of customer value rather than technical tasks.
Defining Business Value
Following the narrative, the Epic must document its defined business value, which links back to the pre-writing justification phase. This section should quantify the expected impact, perhaps in terms of revenue generation, customer retention improvement, or operational cost reduction.
Establishing Scope and Criteria
A well-defined scope boundary is then established, explicitly stating what the Epic will and will not include to prevent scope creep and manage stakeholder expectations. Finally, the Epic documentation includes high-level acceptance criteria, which serve as the “definition of done” for the entire body of work. These criteria are strategic checkpoints, not technical implementation details, confirming that the stated business objective has been achieved upon completion. An example might be, “The new customer dashboard must successfully display real-time order history for all users.”
The Crucial Step of Epic Splitting
Once the Epic is fully documented, the necessary step is decomposition, or splitting, which transforms the large initiative into manageable, executable units of work. This process involves breaking the Epic down first into features, and then further into individual user stories that can be completed within a single sprint. The primary techniques for splitting large work items involve slicing vertically through the Epic’s functionality rather than horizontally.
Splitting by workflow step, such as separating “user registration” from “payment processing,” ensures that each resulting story delivers a small, demonstrable piece of end-to-end value. Alternatively, Epics can be split by user role, addressing the needs of administrators separately from those of general consumers, or by specific business rules, handling simple cases before complex exceptions. The goal of this decomposition is to produce stories that are compliant with the INVEST acronym.
INVEST mandates that resulting stories meet the following criteria:
- Independent, meaning they can be delivered without reliance on others.
- Negotiable, allowing for flexible implementation discussions.
- Valuable to the customer.
- Estimable by the development team.
- Small enough to fit within a sprint.
- Testable to confirm functionality.
This splitting process enables accurate effort estimation, facilitates continuous delivery, and mitigates the risk associated with large, monolithic development efforts.
Maintaining and Tracking the Epic
An Epic requires active management throughout its lifecycle to ensure continued relevance and accurate progress reporting. Progress is commonly tracked by aggregating the completed story points of all underlying user stories associated with the Epic. Alternatively, tracking can be achieved using a percentage complete based on the ratio of finished stories to the total estimated stories within the scope. Regular refinement sessions are necessary to review the remaining work, update any shifting scope boundaries, and ensure the business value proposition remains current. The Epic is formally closed only when all high-level acceptance criteria have been met and the value defined in the initial documentation has been delivered and verified.