Jan 13, 2025
3:00PM - 4:30PM MST (Denver)
As a coach, it’s clear to you that a better backlog, with well-sliced user stories at the top, would help a team you’re coaching become more effective. After all, working in small vertical slices of value is the keystone habit for agile teams. Teams who get that right see everything else work better.
But…
- Developers push back: “Why should we slice things? It’s easier to just build it once while I’m in there.”
- Stakeholders often agree: “We won’t get value from this until we have everything.”
- You’re confident you can split anything, but helping others understand what you get intuitively is a different challenge.
This slows agile adoption to a crawl. Without small vertical slices of value, you end up tweaking the process around the fringes, but your clients don’t see the real benefits an agile approach can offer. Teams and stakeholders become cynical. Backlogs turn into project plans. And, in the end, your coaching doesn’t produce the results you’d like it to.
Thousands of individuals and teams have used Richard Lawrence’s story splitting material over the past 17 years. But most of what he has published online is for practitioners. It’s about how to do story splitting yourself. Helping others develop that skill and make it their own is a whole different thing.
In this exclusive workshop, Richard pulls back the curtain on how to coach story splitting.
You’ll learn…
- How to help each role see the benefit of good story splitting for them
- How to avoid and overcome common story splitting pitfalls
- How to structure practice sessions to help a team develop story splitting skills quickly and reliably
- The thing that often needs to happen before trying to split a story…and how this solves the “unsplittable story” problem
- The deeper pattern behind the story splitting patterns that you can use to get around difficult cases
- How to recognize good and bad splits so the team is set up for success when they get into the work
- And more!
Jergen and I agree that this was and extremely useful session! Very valuable information!
-Baz
About the Workshop Facilitator
Richard Lawrence 
Richard Lawrence’s superpower is bringing together seemingly unrelated fields and ideas to create new possibilities. Drawing on a diverse background in software development, engineering, anthropology, design, and political science, Richard trains and coaches people to collaborate more effectively with other people to solve complex, meaningful problems.
Richard created the wildly-popular “How to Split a User Story” flowchart, which has been downloaded over 1 million times and translated into several languages.
Richard is a Scrum Alliance Certified Enterprise Coach and Certified Scrum Trainer, as well as a certified trainer of the accelerated learning method, Training from the Back of the Room. His book, Behavior-Driven Development with Cucumber, was published by Addison-Wesley in 2019 (for more information, visit bddwithcucumber.com).
When he’s not working with clients, you’ll often find Richard cooking, playing music, practicing Muay Thai, or flying down a mountain on his mountain bike.
Register For This Event
Story Splitting for Coaches (Virtual) – Jan 2025 (PM)
Jan 13, 2025
3:00PM - 4:30PM MST (Denver)