Episode 193: Creating User Stories with Kate Lessard

Kate Lessard Join us as we chat with Kate Lessard, Delivery Team Manager at Arkus, about the critical role of user stories in collaboration and her unique journey into the Salesforce world. Starting her career in the fine arts, Kate made an unexpected transition into Salesforce consulting for nonprofits. In this episode, we have a discussion about the fundamentals of crafting compelling user stories.

We talk about identifying personas, setting acceptance criteria, and how user stories facilitate teamwork. Discover how tools like ChatGPT can leverage AI to define personas and how to dissect solutions into manageable tasks. We also dive into the nuts and bolts of using user stories to foster effective collaboration.

Learn how to pinpoint the atomic level of a good user story and the tools Kate recommends for tracking them. All this and more in this insightful conversation with Kate Lessard!

Show Highlights:

The importance of creating good user stories for effective team collaboration.
Detailed process of crafting user stories, including persona identification and setting acceptance criteria.
The role of background stories and ‘jobs to be done’ in enriching the user story creation process.
The importance of breaking down solutions into manageable tasks and the use of AI tools like ChatGPT in defining personas.
Kate’s personal recommendations for tracking user stories and her unique approach to user story creation.
Discussion on leveraging acceptance criteria and creating backstories for personas to develop efficient user stories.

Episode Transcript

Kate Lessard:
… and accomplishing this one thing. So I think that user stories are really helpful for collaboration because they kind of take the division and the siloing out of the work that we’re doing.

Josh Birk:
That is Kate Lessard, delivery team manager over at Arkus. I’m Josh Birk, your host of the Salesforce Developer Podcast, and here on the podcast you’ll hear stories and insights from developers for developers.
Today, we sit down and talk with Kate about the importance of and how to create good user stories, but we’re going to start, as we often do, with her early years.

Kate Lessard:
Yeah. Interesting story, I went to school. My bachelor’s degree is in fine arts and painting, and then I went to get my master’s in art history and museum studies and was working within the arts.
Got into operations with art shipping for a while, which was really interesting, and then wanted to actually bridge into the museum space and was working for a nonprofit back in Denver that had a exhibit associated with the nonprofit. And yeah, my first day on the job, I thought I was going in to do one thing and they asked me if I’d ever heard of Salesforce.

Josh Birk:
Really?

Kate Lessard:
Yep.

Josh Birk:
That is the most accident-lab-in story I think I may have heard so far.

Kate Lessard:
Yeah, it was a little bit of a panic moment. I was googling Salesforce, trying to figure out what it was, logged in without anyone to guide me around the first time, and just totally terrified.
Fortunately, I got really lucky. They did have a woman who had set up their instance, who used to work for the organization, who was then a consultant, a private consultant, and she came in and basically gave me Salesforce 101 lessons.

Josh Birk:
Okay, interesting. And to call that out, what exactly is a counter-terrorism education learning lab?

Kate Lessard:
Yeah. We did a lot of training for the community, large events. They would go into spaces and train volunteers specifically on how to be aware of signs of terrorism so that they would know how to address it, be safe, alerts, and keep large events safe.

Josh Birk:
Nice. Nice. Well, speaking of large events, we’re talking about something… Oh, I’m sorry. Skipping a question here. How would you describe your current job?

Kate Lessard:
Oh my gosh. My current job was not accidental. It was quite a path to get here, but I work for a consulting firm and we specialized in nonprofits, so I guess in a way it comes full circle.
But I get to lead a team of Salesforce professionals and consultants, and we work primarily in the nonprofit space and just get to solution every day, which is really exciting.

Josh Birk:
Nice. Nice. Without going back to large events, we’re talking about something you’ve presented at both Tahoe Dreamin’ and Forcelandia, but you’re also an organizer with Forcelandia. How did you get involved with the event?

Kate Lessard:
Yeah. When I moved to Oregon, oh my gosh, we moved here the month… Let’s see, we moved to Oregon in October of 2019, so right before the pandemic started. I started to get involved with the local community groups because I didn’t know anyone here other than my coworkers, and I wanted to make friends.
Angela Mahoney was one of the people I had the great fortune of meeting out here and connecting with. And after leaving Denver and being part of the Mile High Dreamin’ committee out there, although at the time it was called Daydreamin5280, just reached out to her and was like, “Hey, can I get involved with this? I would really like to help, and I have a little bit of experience.”
I initially thought I was reaching out to volunteer at the event. Like if they needed any just hands on day of, but it ended up being even better, and now I get to lead speaker communications, which is really fun.

Josh Birk:
Nice, nice. Okay. Well, let’s delve into the topic at hand and let’s just say level set for everybody. How would you define a user story and why are we using it?

Kate Lessard:
Yeah, so I mean user story, the definition’s in the name, right? It’s a story, a non-technical story that’s written from the perspective of the user. It’s identifying in a concise way what needs to happen.

Josh Birk:
So how does this evolve when it comes to crafting a solution?

Kate Lessard:
I think that user stories are really hard, but really important when crafting a solution because they are kind of that bottom line. They’re a really focused, lowest-level individual thing that needs to be accomplished, and they all kind of add up to this big picture of what the solution is.
And I think that that’s where they get a little bit frustrating and confusing because we all live in the big picture. We think of what that end solution looks like, and so how do we break it down into these kind of individual stories.

Josh Birk:
Gotcha. And from an individual user story, what are some of the working parts there?

Kate Lessard:
Yeah. Working parts would include things like identifying a persona. You’re not just saying… As a user, what kind of user? What are you doing? What are your motivations? Who are you writing this for?
It’s not just the user. It is maybe a group of users and their motivations and things that they want to do. User stories include acceptance criteria. What is going to define this as done when we get to the end of it? What do we need to have accomplished? And that needs to be really clear as well. We need information like details of what actually has to happen.

Josh Birk:
When it comes to the personas themselves, are there any tricks to defining those or is it just looking at… Are you asking yourself what is our current user base and how do we segment that out?

Kate Lessard:
It depends. I feel like if you know the organization well, you have a head start. I worked with an insurance brokerage company for a really long time, and I was leading our sales operations, and so I had two very clear personas that I regularly worked with, and in my mind it was either, “Oh, we’re working with this group or we’re working with this group.” And then all of the pieces kind of came into play.
As a consultant, I come in and have to talk to new groups of people where I maybe don’t understand their role or departmental structure and where are those different motivations lie.
So there’s a lot of discovery that goes into that and talking to them and trying to figure out that underlying functionality and what they’re trying to do and who is trying to do what.
It was recently brought to my attention, and I was actually playing around with it a little bit earlier today that ChatGPT is a really cool way to identify personas.
And that was something I had never even thought of, but I just went, typed in: what are sales personas? And it just kept going and going and going, and it was really fascinating.

Josh Birk:
And so I definitely wanted to ask a little bit more about AI, and I get paid like a nickel every time I say either ChatGPT or AI or bar. So it’s all-

Kate Lessard:
And that’s keep going, every other one.

Josh Birk:
Exactly. Is that something that you’re finding, that you’re pulling more into either this kind of work or your day-to-day work? Is AI starting to bleed itself into how you’re getting these things done?

Kate Lessard:
Personally, it’s not at this point in time, but I don’t think that that means that it’s not a future possibility and something we’ll see more and more. I do know that at both Forcelandia and Tahoe Dreamin’, it came up.
We were talking about how we can be efficient and how we can get our user stories done, and we talked about the age-old like, create a library of the ones that you regularly use that apply to almost every situation.
And then someone hopped in at both conferences and said, “Actually, I just tried this out with ChatGPT, and I threw them in and AI helped me out. And yes, they were not all exactly right and it didn’t take the work completely out of it. I had to go through them and refine and streamline.”
But apparently people are doing it. It’s saving a lot of time, and also bringing up some kind of ideas and thoughts that they hadn’t really occurred to them as they were writing their traditional user stories.

Josh Birk:
Now, when it comes to things like writing the acceptance criteria, are you writing that kind of per…
So you’ve got the persona and then you have the acceptance criteria. What’s in the middle? Are you crafting a narrative there? Is it described as jobs to be done? What’s the raw material of the user story itself?

Kate Lessard:
Yeah, absolutely. Jobs to be done or a backstory information I find to be really helpful, especially in consulting if I’m sharing this with my dev team because we’re not part of the organizations that we work with in the traditional sense, yes, we’re partners and we get to know them very well, but we don’t work there. We don’t have the full backstory of maybe what was done before we joined the picture and maybe things that they’ve tried that didn’t work out in the past.
So I find that backstory is a really important piece of that. And then jobs to be done, it depends what methodology you’re using, how you actually structure that, but there’s definitely that kind of middle ground too.

Josh Birk:
Got it. So it’s a little bit of setting up the current, I guess, I don’t want to say problem, the current situation, and maybe why in terms of journalism, you have your persona, you’ve got the who, and a backstory would give you a little bit of the why?

Kate Lessard:
Yes, absolutely.

Josh Birk:
Yeah. So, and the-

Kate Lessard:
We always start with why. It’s like one of our Arkus mottoes.

Josh Birk:
Gotcha, gotcha. And then what about crafting a narrative for the how itself?

Kate Lessard:
Yeah, that gets tricky, because then you get into the, what belongs in the backstory, what belongs in the narrative, and then what do we actually break into the individual user story line items? And I think that there’s kind of a balance between all three of those.

Josh Birk:
Right. And how much do you want… When do you feel like it’s a good level between the persona who’s sort of our artificial, not artificial…
But the role of the person who’s going to be defining the acceptance criteria, how can you tell a good user story from it being handed off to the tech people itself, the people who are going to actually be crafting the solution?

Kate Lessard:
Yeah. I want to make sure that my users have eyes on this, that they understand it, that they see that acceptance criteria in particular and are like, “Yes, these are the things that need to be done. I sign off on this, whether that’s a actual true sign off or just them understanding what we’re getting to.”
And I think that’s why it’s really important that user stories are presented as non-technical documents because… I mean, none of my users, and I shouldn’t say none, the vast majority of my users I’ve worked with in the past, they’re not necessarily technical folks.

Josh Birk:
Mm-hmm. So I mean, in some ways, the user story shouldn’t actually consist of the solution itself or the portion of the solution itself. It’s more of the question being posed to the solution.

Kate Lessard:
Absolutely.

Josh Birk:
Yeah. When you’re reading through a user story, are there things that you’re like, “This is a good one,” versus, “This is a bad one”? Or there high levels red flags and green flags?

Kate Lessard:
Mm-hmm. That’s a great question. First thing, is it concise? Can I read this and understand clearly what this user story is saying?
I think a lot of times we get carried away and we are like, “Oh, this user story includes this and this and this and this and this and this.”
And so if I see a lot of ands, I’m like, “Whoa, that’s a red flag right off the bat.” Do we need to break these down? Is this as low as we can break this down or does this break into more individual user stories?

Josh Birk:
Got it. And so do you feel like it should be a… What’s the atomic level of a good user story? Is that something that’s going to require…
You’re hearing multiple user stories, therefore you’re actually like, “No, wait, these are actually multiple problems. We need multiple solutions for this”?

Kate Lessard:
Yeah. Yeah, and I think a lot of times there are many kind of user stories that roll up to these larger initiatives, and it’s a matter of just how we’re breaking those down.

Josh Birk:
Gotcha. Do you have any tools that you recommend when you’re developing this? Do you have a favorite way of tracking the user story, or is it just a matter of making sure it’s documented at all?

Kate Lessard:
Yeah, I think documentation at all is key. I feel like I’ve seen it done all the way from a Word document to using something like a Jira, which obviously has its advantages where you can actually have many people collaborating and adding story points and doing more with the actual system. But I think just documenting it at all is key.

Josh Birk:
Do the words, “Do not erase,” give you any fear?

Kate Lessard:
Yeah. A little bit, yep.

Josh Birk:
Well, tell me a little bit more about the collaboration front. So we have our personas, you’ve got your stakeholders, you’ve got your tech teams. How does the user story play into collaboration itself?

Kate Lessard:
Yeah. And I think that this is one of the key things about why we write user stories. They really place the focus on the user. So it’s not like, “Hey, I’m the user.” “I am the admin,” or, “I’m the business analyst,” or, “I’m the developer.”
We’re all coming together and focusing on a single goal, and that is our users or either internal or external clients and accomplishing this one thing. So I think that user stories are really helpful for collaboration because they kind of take the division and the siloing out of the work that we’re doing and bring us all together working towards a single goal.

Josh Birk:
Got it. So on the collaboration front, when does the tech team get involved? If I’m a developer listening to this and I’m like, “I’ve never heard of a user story before.” When do you think they should be raising their flag and being like, “No, no, no, no. We need to go back and get this documentation done”?

Kate Lessard:
Yeah, I think that there’s a lot of work that goes in before you actually have a user story. You’re doing your discovery, you’re gathering your requirements, you’re getting the information you need to actually provide that backstory.
Interesting tip someone presented me at Forcelandia was that they start with their acceptance criteria. So they start with the things that need to be done first, and then they go back and write their user story from that, which I thought was really interesting.
So I think that once that user story is actually clearly defined, that’s when we loop in our tech team and are like, “Okay, great brains come together. How do we best solution for this?”

Josh Birk:
That’s fascinating. I would think there’s a strict chronology to that. You start with your persona, you start with your… Okay, let me pitch this to you.
So persona, backstory, narrative, acceptance criteria. So are they skipping persona, even? Just sort of using acceptance criteria as like, “If we threw Hail Mary today, this is the stuff we want to score”?

Kate Lessard:
Ooh, that’s a good question. I’d have to go back and ask. I think my understanding was that the persona was defined, but then they go straight to the acceptance criteria and write those things out that need to happen, and then go back to the actual bulk of the user story itself. Getting into that actual backstory and the narrative that they’re pulling in. But I mean, it blew my mind.

Josh Birk:
True.

Kate Lessard:
I’ve never done it that way.

Josh Birk:
It kind of reminds me of the concept of writing unit tests for development that are going to fail and then going back and proving them right, basically. That is…
I guess, in that sense, you could use the balance between your acceptance testing or your acceptance criteria and your narrative to prove both of them correct. If you start with the finish and then put in the middle, and then you read the middle and it makes sense, then you’ve accomplished. Fascinating. Any other tips that have come out from your talks?

Kate Lessard:
Yeah, I think that other tips that we’ve talked to, and I looped in the developers that I regularly work with to get their feedback and their thoughts of what is really important to them as user stories are passed to them. And the other kind of really important things that keep coming up over and over again have been that obviously detail is important. Which direction are things moving?
Is that an API name, or is that what the user’s referring to that field by? Is there any documentation? Do we have any data mapping that we can reference? Just all the little details that we can put alongside that are just kind of additional to the user story, I think that my developers want it.

Josh Birk:
Right. Right. They want the specific nouns, and the verbs, and the things that are going to check off. Have you found developers… Do you know of the developers who are taking the acceptance criteria and converting that into unit tests?

Kate Lessard:
I do not know the answer to that.

Josh Birk:
Okay.

Kate Lessard:
I’m going to assume so.

Josh Birk:
I mean, that’s kind of the answers, is like, “They should be.”

Kate Lessard:
Yeah. Right.

Josh Birk:
That’s what a unit test is good for.

Kate Lessard:
Right.

Josh Birk:
All right. Any other good resources or tricks or anything like that that you would want to give a shutout to?

Kate Lessard:
Yeah, I love the Atlassian blog. They have a really great post about user stories that I’ve been kind of quoting and using in my talks that I’ve done this year, so I’ll definitely share that link. And then I found… I’m trying to think.
There was another really great blog post I found that had some really fantastic and funny examples. They had this one example about… Like, from the perspective of an app user and then from the perspective of an admin and then back to the perspective of the app user and this back and forth dialogue that ended up being kind of funny.

Josh Birk:
Oh. So not just like a persona, but a conversation and personas.

Kate Lessard:
And that’s how they kind of presented it, and it was hilarious. I’m trying to think. It was, “As an app user, I want to add profile photos to…” whatever the case was.
And then it was, “As an admin, I want to be able to delete people’s photos in case they put bad or nude photos on their profile.” It was pretty funny.

Josh Birk:
Well, that’s actually… I really like that. That’s pretty clever because it’s… Oh, I’m trying to remember the polite way of saying this. “Our system would run so much better if it weren’t for all the damned users,” I think it is.

Kate Lessard:
Right. I was on a call the other day and it was with an educational institution, and they were talking about… They’re like, “Well, what kind of roadblocks do you have?”
And they’re like, “Well, students are silly.”
It was like, “All right, fair.”

Josh Birk:
That’s fair. And probably a fair few of them are trying to break the rules just because they’re bored.

Kate Lessard:
Yep.

Josh Birk:
Yeah, I could see that. Do you have… And obviously we don’t have to name any names, do you have any hilariously bad examples?

Kate Lessard:
Oh, gosh. Definitely have seen some bad ones come through.

Josh Birk:
Yeah.

Kate Lessard:
A lot of times they’re the ones that just have… They’re just trying to pack way too much in, and you’re like, “What does actually needs to happen here?” If you don’t understand what the goal is, it should just go out the window.

Josh Birk:
Right. If I have to read your tall story, then we’re probably not going to get this thing done.

Kate Lessard:
Yeah. No, thank you.

Josh Birk:
And that’s our show. Now, before we go, I did ask after Kate’s favorite non-technical hobby and well, this is a hot one.

Kate Lessard:
Love yoga. I teach hot yoga and I practice it three to five times a week. It is my full of workouts, stress relief, just happy place.

Josh Birk:
Nice. Defined hot yoga for me. Is that… He said, question mark, question mark.

Kate Lessard:
So it’s usually like a power vinyasa flow, and it is typically around 95 degrees or hotter sometimes with humidity added in.

Josh Birk:
Wow.

Kate Lessard:
It is definitely like you are meant to sweat.

Josh Birk:
I want to thank Kate for the great conversation information. As always, I want to thank you for listening.
Now, if you want to learn more about this show, head on over to developer.salesforce.com/podcast where you can hear old episodes, see the show notes, and it links to your favorite podcast service. Thanks again everybody, and we’ll talk to you next week.

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