Workshop

Stories Developers Love - Product Execution With Stories

Olatunji Fagbore

AI & iOT Product Leader

Your stories come back from refinement full of questions, testers find gaps late

Scrum.org lists poor backlog and refinement practice among the most common PO anti-patterns, including refining with only the lead engineer instead of the whole team. Unclear stories cause rework, missed sprint goals and friction with engineering. Story craft is a basic skill, but many POs were never properly taught it.

What you’ll learn

Master stories, acceptance criteria, splitting and refinement, and become the Product Owner developers trust and leaders promote.

  • Apply the INVEST checklist and a story template with explicit "in scope / out of scope"

  • Before-and-after demo using participants' real stories

  • Learn Gherkin-style acceptance criteria from scratch

  • Practise turning a vague requirement into testable scenarios

  • Use 10 story-splitting patterns (workflow steps, business rules, data variations, happy/unhappy paths and more)

  • Hands-on: split your own epic into sprint-sized stories

  • Use an edge-case prompt list (errors, permissions, performance, accessibility, security)

  • Add non-functional requirements as acceptance criteria or definition of done items

  • Set up a Definition of Ready checklist with your team

  • Build the habit of whole-team refinement instead of relying on the lead engineer

Workshop agenda

  • Anatomy of a Story That Works (30 min)

    Learn what makes a user story clear and buildable: a specific user, a real need, the value behind it and explicit scope boundaries. We compare weak and strong stories side by side and test them agains

  • Acceptance Criteria, Edge Cases and Non-Functional Requirements (60 min)

    Write Given/When/Then acceptance criteria that developers can build from and QA can test directly. You'll use an edge-case prompt list (errors, permissions, performance, accessibility, security) to un

  • Splitting Your Own Epics into Thin Slices (60 min, hands-on)

    Bring a real epic and break it into sprint-sized stories that each deliver user value. You'll practise 10 splitting patterns, including workflow steps, business rules, data variations and happy/unhapp

  • Running Whole-Team Refinement and a Definition of Ready (30 min)

    Turn refinement from a long Q&A into a focused working session. You'll get a refinement agenda that involves the whole team rather than only the lead engineer, and draft a Definition of Ready checklis

  • Before-and-After Review of Your Real Stories (30 min)

    Apply everything to stories from your own backlog. Participants share an original story and its rewritten version, and the group reviews clarity, testability and size, so you leave with improved stori

Learn directly from Olatunji

Olatunji Fagbore

Olatunji Fagbore

Contact

Product Leader (Camlin, Cinerworld, Toloram, Contracts)

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Who this workshop is for

  • Ideal for: POs and BAs whose stories bounce back, and Senior POs who coach others

  • Take this if: your team keeps carrying stories over, developers complain about unclear requirements, or you're new to the PO role

  • Pain points we fix: long refinement meetings; rework; late surprises in testing

Prerequisites

  • Stories

    Writing stories or requirements for a delivery team

  • Account On Project Management Tools like Jira

    One epic or large feature to split

What's included

Lifetime access

Go back to course content and recordings whenever you need to.

Community of peers

Stay accountable and share insights with like-minded professionals.

Certificate of completion

Share your new skills with your employer or on LinkedIn.

One live, hands-on workshop.

60% of the time spent practising in small groups rather than watching slides.

Work on your own backlog.

Bring a real epic and leave with your own stories rewritten to a “ready” standard.

A realistic case study

Practise on 6 cases set in a fictional product team on Uber’s UK rider app, not toy examples.

Acceptance criteria QA can test as written.

Given/When/Then plus an 8-category edge-case checklist.

Break down any initiative, epic or story.

SPIDR, 10 splitting patterns, impact mapping and story mapping, all in one method.

The 50 most common mistakes.

A checklist to audit your backlog in 15 minutes.

9 ready-to-use templates.

Stories, acceptance criteria, Definition of Ready, refinement agenda and more, ready to paste into Jira or Azure DevOps.

Maven Guarantee

Your purchase is backed by the Maven Guarantee.

Frequently asked questions

Maven for Teams

Reimbursement

Get your company to pay

Everything L&D needs: email template, receipts, and certificate of completion.

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Private cohort

Run a cohort for your org

A dedicated cohort with a custom schedule and curriculum, tailored to your team.

Book a private cohort