Playbook 4 · Setting up the work

How to break an epic into stories

A story is the smallest piece of user-visible value the team can ship. If it doesn't change the user's experience, it's a chapter, not a story.

Why it matters

Bad story breakdown is the silent killer of throughput. Stories that are too big stall in In Progress for weeks; stories that are too small flood the backlog with noise. The right grain, one user-visible behaviour change per story, is what keeps flow predictable.

Step by step

  1. Start from the epic hypothesis. What's the smallest user-visible change that tests it?
  2. Slice by user behaviour, not by layer. "Show personalised welcome", not "build the recommendation API".
  3. Write each as As-a / I-want / so-that. If you can't, the slice is wrong.
  4. Add 3–6 acceptance criteria per story. Each one is a binary yes/no test.
  5. Estimate in story points. Anything over 8 should probably be split.
  6. Mark risk + dependencies. If it depends on another team's work, the dep detector will spot it overnight, confirm or reject.
  7. Run the Story Architect agent. Cross-checks against your codebase, retro themes, sibling stories.

What good looks like

  • As-a / I-want / so-that form
  • 3–6 binary acceptance criteria
  • Story points ≤ 8
  • Risk level + flagged deps
  • Each story changes user-visible behaviour
  • The set covers the epic with no obvious gaps

How Tenhaw runs this

AI Boost takes a committed outcome and proposes 4-6 epics with 20+ stories at IDEA in one click. Each story arrives with a draft PR scaffold. The Story Architect agent cross-checks each one against your codebase, sibling stories, and recent retro themes before backlog lock.

  • Tenhaw Story Architect AI agent
  • Tenhaw AI Boost
  • Tenhaw Idea Capture AI agent
  • Tenhaw cross-team dependency detector

Try this on the Tenhaw platform →

If you've got a rough outcome and zero stories, click AI Boost on the outcome, it generates 4–6 epics and 20+ stories at the Idea stage in one go. Then refine.

Related playbooks

5How to do discovery research 3How to write a value-focused epic 2How to put together a quarterly roadmap 1How to set an outcome

Run this in your team

The Tenhaw product enforces every rule in this playbook so it doesn't sit on a wiki gathering dust. Try Tenhaw or book a working session with the founder.