A worked example demonstrating the full user-story-guide process end-to-end: persona definition, feature extraction, backlog item identification, and user story writing with acceptance criteria. Uses a Marketing team persona and a site performance tracking feature as the running example.
Persona: Marketing Team
| Aspect | Details |
|---|---|
| Role | Site performance, SEO rankings, conversion optimization |
| KPIs | Organic traffic, search rankings, conversion rates |
| Goals | Maintain Lighthouse/Core Web Vitals scores; understand release impact on metrics |
| Challenges | No pre-production perf visibility; can’t correlate releases to perf changes; reactive to issues |
Feature: Track Performance Impact
Visibility into how code changes and releases affect Lighthouse scores and Core Web Vitals throughout the development lifecycle.
Backlog Items
Three user stories derived from the feature, all under the Site Performance epic:
| Story | Who | What | Why |
|---|---|---|---|
| PR performance review | Marketing team member | See perf impact analysis before code goes live | Ensure no change degrades rankings/conversion |
| Production performance monitoring | Marketing team member | View real user perf data and historical trends | Correlate metrics with SEO/conversion |
| Performance reporting and alerting | Marketing team stakeholder | Receive alerts when scores degrade below thresholds | Respond before business impact |
Each story includes Given/When/Then acceptance scenarios, implementation tasks, and — where needed — technical enablers (e.g., Performance Budget Definition). See the full source for complete scenario details.
Key Patterns Demonstrated
- Persona-driven stories — the “As a” role maps directly to the defined persona
- Feature-to-PBI decomposition — one feature yields three focused stories
- Given/When/Then acceptance criteria — 3-4 scenarios per story covering primary and edge cases
- Tasks as technical breakdown — engineers own the task decomposition
- Technical enabler — Performance Budget Definition is carved out as a separate enabler rather than embedded in a story, following the pattern from user-story-guide
- Theme alignment — stories fall under the Performance theme (Cross-Cutting Concerns)