Building Agile Products with Epics and User Stories

In the world of agile product development, epics and user stories are more than just terminology—they are powerful tools that help product teams deliver value to users efficiently. At Roaring Infotech, we use these frameworks to align user needs with business objectives and ensure product development runs smoothly, especially for early-stage startups where clarity is everything.

Understanding Themes, Epics, and User Stories

Themes, epics, and user stories form the hierarchical structure of agile product development. Here's how they stack up:

• ✔️ Themes represent broad strategic objectives or problem spaces.
• ✔️ Epics are large bodies of work that fall under a theme.
• ✔️ User stories are the smallest units of work, detailing specific user needs that contribute to the epic.

This breakdown helps startups turn big ideas into manageable work units, guiding development through the lens of the end user.

🔍 Need help defining what to build? Check out our guide on Scope Discovery.

How Roaring Infotech Uses Epics and User Stories

📌 Early Stages: Laying the Foundation

In the idea phase, our product teams create all themes, epics, and user stories to map out the initial MVP scope. This early clarity ensures smoother planning, better time estimates, and alignment between design, engineering, and stakeholders.

🚀 Post-MVP: Iterative Product Growth

After launching the MVP, we continue using epics and user stories to define sprint work. Our dual-track agile process keeps the backlog refined and actionable, with every user story reviewed in detail. This ensures accurate estimation, shared understanding, and effective sprint planning.

🧠 Complex Builds: Functional Specs as a Supplement

For more sophisticated products, we go beyond user stories. Our teams introduce functional specifications—detailed documents outlining screen-by-screen behavior. This ensures we never lose sight of the full scope while building iteratively.

Tips for Writing Effective Epics and User Stories

From our experience building 35+ startup products, here are some essential practices:

1. Start with the user: Write stories from the user’s perspective. Understand their goals, needs, and frustrations.
2. Keep it simple: Use clear, concise language. Avoid technical jargon and ambiguity.
3. Make it collaborative: Include designers, developers, QA, and product managers in the story-writing process.
4. Focus on value: Tie each story back to a business or user outcome. This keeps priorities aligned.
5. Define Ready and Done: Use “Definition of Ready” (DoR) and “Definition of Done” (DoD) checklists to set expectations and maintain quality.

✅ Roaring Infotech’s Definition of Ready

A user story is ready when:

• ✔️ It’s part of a theme and epic that align with product goals.
• ✔️ Subtasks, test cases, and acceptance criteria are clearly defined.
• ✔️ All dependencies are mapped and resolved.
• ✔️ Stakeholder-approved designs are finalized.
• ✔️ Edge cases and error states are considered.
• ✔️ The team understands the story fully and has estimated its effort.

✅ Roaring Infotech’s Definition of Done

A user story is done when:

• ✔️ All subtasks and acceptance criteria are completed.
• ✔️ Code has passed peer review and is merged cleanly.
• ✔️ Unit tests (if needed) pass successfully.
• ✔️ QA testing is complete with no unresolved bugs.
• ✔️ Documentation and prototypes are updated.
• ✔️ The feature has been demoed and stakeholder feedback is addressed.

Wrapping Up

At Roaring Infotech, we believe that themes, epics, and user stories are the backbone of agile product development. By combining these tools with clear definitions of readiness and completeness, we empower teams to move fast without sacrificing quality.

Whether you’re launching an MVP or scaling an enterprise platform, the disciplined use of epics and user stories ensures your product always delivers value—and stays on track.