High-Level: Epics and Initiatives
Epics are large bodies of work that can be broken down into a number of smaller tasks or user stories.
Initiatives are collections of epics that drive toward a common goal. In many cases, an initiative compiles epics from multiple teams to achieve a much broader, bigger goal than any of the epics themselves. While an epic is something you might complete in a month or a quarter, initiatives are often completed in multiple quarters to a year.
Granular: Stories and Tasks
efine the work that needs to happen on a granular level.
User stories: a customer-centric way of talking about the work we need to do. Read: user stories for marketing teams. “Marketers often receive commands to build a new campaign, write a new blog series, or explore a new social media channel with little context. The “why” of what we do, the audience we’re trying to reach, can often be left out entirely.“
Examples:
As a marketing manager, I would like A/B testing software on our website so that I can experiment with different promotions on our homepage.
As a follower of the AgileSherpas blog, I would like to have easier access to their downloadable cornerstone content so I can stay on top of new articles to share with my team.
Conceptual: Themes
Themes are an organizational tool that allows you to label backlog items, epics, and initiatives to understand what work contributes to what organizational goals. Themes should inspire the creation of epics and initiatives but don’t have a ridgid 1-to-1 relationship with them. A theme for a rocket ship company would be something like “Safety First.”
