Epics and User Stories

Background
Adrian, Diederik and I sat down and came up with a lightweight process to add more descriptive, higher level project descriptions to the backlog. We used the first release of UMAPI/UserMetrics to model how this actually worked in practice. We think this will be sufficient for a while but there are definitely some issues, particularly around tooling that we should review.

Process

 * 1) Product Owner works with Stakeholders on Epics -- high level description of user value
 * 2) Product Owner breaks down Epics into User Stories -- a sprint level task that generates user value
 * 3) Development does very basic t-shirt sizing on the Epics (using the Stories to help)
 * 4) We ask our stakeholders to prioritize these epics based on the costing and the available bandwidth of the team
 * 5) We'll do this in the Planning meeting on a quarterly cadence initially
 * 6) Developers turn User Stories of prioritized epics into technical tasks and get things done
 * 7) Systems Non-functional requirements (SLAs, capacity, etc) defined on a system level

Tools
Mingle 'Feature' Cards correspond to a User Story Strategies to deal with that:
 * But we have a hard time managing specific tasks
 * Make smaller cards
 * Use Asana to manage tasks
 * Check with dev team

Epic
As a grantmaker, I want to be able to create and query specific cohorts of users to measure activity to understand what the impact of my programs is.

User Story 1
I want to be able to [create|read|upload|delete] my own cohorts with the following parameters
 * Username
 * Country
 * Age
 * Gender

User Story 2
I want to measure the following attributes
 * Bytes Added
 * Pages Created...

User Story 3
I want my output to be available in JSON format.

Responsibilities
If we pivot the above process, we end up with these responsibilities:

Product Owner Development Team Stakeholders
 * Create Epics with Stakeholders
 * Prioritize Epics across Stakeholders
 * Break down Epics into User Stories
 * Cost and provide feedback to Product Owner/Stakeholders on Epics and User Stories
 * Design and build software to provide the business value described in the Epics and User Stories
 * Work 1:1 with Product Owner to create Epics and User Stories
 * Participate in Stakeholder-wide prioritization sessions