how to write an epic hypothesis statement

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What if we found ourselves building something that nobody wanted? In that case what did it matter if we did it on time and on budget? —Eric Ries

Portfolio epics are typically cross-cutting, typically spanning multiple value streams and Program Increments (PIs). SAFe recommends applying the Lean Startup build-measure-learn cycle for epics to accelerate the learning and development process, and to reduce risk.

This article primarily describes the definition, approval, and implementation of portfolio epics . Program and Large solution epics, which follow a similar pattern, are described briefly at the end of this article.

There are two types of epics, each of which may occur at different levels of the Framework. Business epics directly deliver business value, while enabler epics are used to advance the Architectural Runway  to support upcoming business or technical needs.

It’s important to note that epics are not merely a synonym for projects; they operate quite differently, as Figure 1 highlights. SAFe generally discourages using the project funding model (refer to the Lean Portfolio Management article). Instead, the funding to implement epics is allocated directly to the value streams within a portfolio. Moreover, Agile Release Trains (ARTs) develop and deliver epics following the Lean Startup cycle (Figure 6).

Defining Epics

Since epics are some of the most significant enterprise investments, stakeholders need to agree on their intent and definition. Figure 2 provides an epic hypothesis statement template that can be used to capture, organize, and communicate critical information about an epic.

Download Epic Hypothesis Statement

Portfolio epics are made visible, developed, and managed through the  Portfolio Kanban system where they proceed through various states of maturity until they’re approved or rejected. Before being committed to implementation, epics require analysis. Epic Owners take responsibility for the critical collaborations required for this task, while  Enterprise Architects typically shepherd the enabler epics that support the technical considerations for business epics.

Defining the Epic MVP

Analysis of an epic includes the definition of a Minimum Viable Product (MVP) for the epic. In the context of SAFe, an MVP is an early and minimal version of a new product or business Solution that is used to prove or disprove the epic hypothesis . As opposed to story boards, prototypes, mockups, wire frames and other exploratory techniques, the MVP is an actual product that can be used by real customers to generate validated learning.

Creating the Lean Business Case

The result of the epic analysis is a Lean business case (Figure 3).

Download Lean Business Case

The LPM reviews the Lean business case to make a go/no-go decision for the epic. Once approved, portfolio epics stay in the portfolio backlog until implementation capacity and budget becomes available from one or more ARTs. The Epic Owner is responsible for working with Product and Solution Management  and  System Architect/Engineering to split the epic into Features or Capabilities during backlog refinement. Epic Owners help prioritize these items in their respective backlogs and have some ongoing responsibilities for stewardship and follow-up.

Estimating Epic Costs

As Epics progress through the Portfolio Kanban, the LPM team will eventually need to understand the potential investment required to realize the hypothesized value. This requires a meaningful estimate of the cost of the MVP and the forecasted cost of the full implementation should the epic hypothesis be proven true.

• The MVP cost ensures the portfolio is budgeting enough money to prove/disprove the Epic hypothesis and helps ensure that LPM is making investments in innovation in accordance with lean budget guardrails
• The forecasted implementation cost factors into ROI analysis, help determine if the business case is sound, and helps the LPM team prepare for potential adjustments to value stream budgets

The MVP cost estimate is created by the epic owner in collaboration with other key stakeholders. It should include an amount sufficient to prove or disprove the MVP hypothesis. Once approved, the MVP cost is considered a hard limit, and the value stream will not spend more than this cost in building and evaluating the MVP. If the value stream has evidence that this cost will be exceeded during epic implementation, further work on the epic should be stopped.

Estimating Implementation Cost

The MVP and/or the full implementation cost is further comprised of costs associated with the internal value streams plus any costs associated with external suppliers. It is initially estimated using t-shirt sizing (Figure 4) and refined over time as the MVP is implemented.

Estimating Epics in the early stages can be difficult since there is limited data and learning at this point. T-shirt sizing is a cost estimation technique which can be used by LPM, Epic Owners, architects and engineers, and other stakeholders to collaborate on the placement of epics into groups (or cost bands) of a similar size. A cost range is established for each T-shirt size using historical data. Each portfolio determines the relevant cost range for each T-shirt size. The gaps in the cost ranges reflect the uncertainty of estimates and avoid too much discussion around the edge cases. The full implementation cost can be refined over time as the MVP is built and learning occurs

Supplier Costs

An Epic investment often includes a contribution and cost from suppliers, whether internal or external. Ideally, enterprises engage external suppliers via Agile contracts which supports estimating the costs of a suppliers contribution to a specific epic. For more on this topic, see the Agile Contracts advanced topic article.

Forecasting an epic’s duration

While it can be challenging to forecast the duration of an epic implemented by a mix of internal ARTs and external suppliers, an understanding of the forecasted duration of the epic is critical to the proper functioning of the portfolio. Similar to the cost of an epic, the duration of the epic can be forecasted as an internal duration, the supplier duration, and the necessary collaborations and interactions between the internal team and the external team. Practically, unless the epic is completely outsourced, LPM can focus on forecasts of the internal ARTs affected by the epic, as internal ARTs are expected to coordinate work with external suppliers.

Forecasting an epic’s duration requires an understanding of three data points:

• An epic’s estimated size in story points for each affected ART, which can be estimated using the T-shirt estimation technique for costs by replacing the cost range with a range of points
• The historical velocity of the affected ARTs
• The percent (%) capacity allocation that can be dedicated to working on the epic as negotiated between Product and Solution Management, epic owners, and LPM

In the example shown in Figure 5, a portfolio has a substantial enabler epic that affects three ARTs and LPM seeks to gain an estimate of the forecasted number of PIs. ART 1 has estimated the epic’s size as 2,000 – 2,500 points. Product Management determines that ART 1 can allocate 40% of total capacity toward implementing its part of the epic. With a historical velocity of 1,000 story points per PI, ART 1 forecasts between five to seven PIs for the epic.

After repeating these calculations for each ART, the epic owner can see that while some ARTs will likely be ready to release on demand earlier than others, the forecasted duration to deliver the entire epic across all of the ARTs will likely be between six and eight PIs. If this forecast does not align with business requirements, further negotiations will ensue, such as adjusting capacity allocations or allocating more budget to work delivered by suppliers. Once the epic is initiated, the epic owner will continually update the forecasted completion.

Implementing Epics

The Lean Startup strategy recommends a highly iterative build-measure-learn cycle for product innovation and strategic investments. This strategy for implementing epics provides the economic and strategic advantages of a Lean startup by managing investment and risk incrementally while leveraging the flow and visibility benefits of SAFe (Figure 6). Gathering the data necessary to prove or disprove the Epic Hypothesis is a highly iterative process that continues until a data-driven result is obtained or the team consumes the MVP budget. In general, the result of a proven hypothesis is an MVP suitable for continued investment by the value stream. Continued investment in an Epic that has a dis-proven hypothesis requires the creation of a new epic and approval from the LPM Function.

SAFe Lean Startup Cycle

After it’s approved for implementation, the Epic Owner works with the Agile Teams to begin the development activities needed to realize the epic’s business outcomes hypothesis:

• If the hypothesis is proven true,  the epic enters the persevere state, which  will drive more work by implementing additional features and capabilities. ARTs manage any further investment in the Epic via ongoing WSJF feature prioritization of the Program Backlog . Local features identified by the ART, and those from the epic, compete during routine WSJF reprioritization.
• However, if the hypothesis is proven false, Epic owners can decide to pivot by creating a new epic for LPM review or dropping the initiative altogether and switching to other work in the backlog.

After evaluating an epic’s hypothesis, it may or may not be considered to remain as a portfolio concern. However, the Epic Owner may have some ongoing responsibilities for stewardship and follow-up.

The empowerment and decentralized decision-making of Lean budgets depend on Guardrails for specific checks and balances. Value stream KPIs and other metrics also support guardrails to keep the LPM informed of the epic’s progress toward meeting its business outcomes hypothesis.

Program and Solution Epics

Epics may also originate from local ARTs or Solution Trains, often starting as initiatives that warrant LPM attention because of their significant business impact or initiatives that exceed the epic threshold. These epics warrant a Lean Business Case and review and approval through the Portfolio Kanban system. The Program and Solution Kanban article describes methods for managing the flow of these epics.

Last update: 20 October 2022

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The SAFe® Epic – an example

We often have questions about what a “good” sufficiently developed SAFe Epic looks like. In this example we use with clients during the Lean Portfolio Management learning journey, we dive into an example of real-world details behind an epic hypothesis statement.

For now, we have not provided a fully developed SAFe Lean Business Case as an example because business cases are typically highly contextual to the business or mission. That being said please remember that the core of the business case is established and driven from the Epic Hypothesis Statement and carried over into the documented business case.

Agile Lifecycle Management Solution Enabler Epic

Epic Owner: John Q. Smith

Epic Description

The big awesome product company requires a common platform for collaboration on work of all types across the portfolio for all teams, managers, architects, directors, and executives including customer collaboration and feedback loops. This solution will solve the problems in our system where we have poor quality or non-existent measurement and multiple disparate systems to manage and report on work.

For the Portfolio Teams

Who needs to manage their work, flow, and feedback

The single-source system of record for all work

IS A web-based software tool suite that provides customizable workflows that support the enterprise strategic themes related to creating better business and IT outcomes using guidance from the Scaled Agile Framework for Lean Enterprises (SAFe), Technology Business Management (TBM), and Value Stream Management (VSM) via the Flow Framework

THAT will provide a common place for all customers and portfolio stakeholders to have a transparent vision into all of the work occurring in the system/portfolio, provide a mechanism to manage capacity at scale, and enable easier concurrent road mapping  

UNLIKE the current array of disparate, ad hoc tools and platforms

OUR SOLUTION will organize all work in a holistic, transparent, visible manner using a common enterprise backlog model combined with an additive enterprise agile scaling framework as guidance including DevOps, Lean+Systems Thinking, and Agile

Business Outcomes:

• Validate that the solution provides easy access to data and/or analytics, and charts for the six flow metrics: distribution, time, velocity, load, efficiency, and predictability for product/solution features (our work). (binary)
• The solution also provides flow metrics for Lean-Agile Teams stories and backlog items. (binary)
• 90% of teams are using the solution to manage 100% of their work and effort within the first year post implementation
• All features and their lead, cycle, and process times (for the continuous delivery pipeline) are transparent. Feature lead and cycle times for all value streams using the system are visible. (binary)
• Lean flow measurements — Lead and cycle times, six SAFe flow metrics, and DevOps metrics enabled in the continuous delivery pipeline integrated across the entire solution platform (binary)
• Activity ratios for workflow, processes, and steps are automatically calculated (binary)
• Percent complete and accurate (%C&A) measures for value streams automatically calculated or easily accessible data (binary)
• Number of documented improvements implemented in the system by teams using data/information sourced from the ALM solution > 25 in the first six months post implementation
• Number of documented improvements implemented in the system by teams using data/information sourced from the ALM solution > 100 in the first year post implementation
• Flow time metrics improve from baseline by 10% in the first year post implementation (lead time for features)
• Portfolio, Solution/Capability, and Program Roadmaps can be generated by Lean Portfolio Management (LPM), Solution Management, and Product Management at will from real-time data in the ALM (binary)
• Roadmaps will be available online for general stakeholder consumption (transparency)
• Increase customer NPS for forecasting and communication of solution progress and transparency of execution by 20% in the first year post implementation (survey + baseline)
• Build a taxonomy for all work including a service catalog (binary)
• Run the system and the system produces the data to produce the capacity metrics for all value streams to enable the LPM guardrail (binary)
• Stops obfuscation of work hidden in the noise of the one sized fits all backlog model (everything is a CRQ/Ticket) and allows for more accurate and representative prioritization including the application of an economic decision-making framework using a taxonomy for work (binary)
• Enables full truth in reporting and transparency of actual flow to everyone, real-time – including customers (100% of work is recorded in the system of record)
• Enables live telemetry of progress towards objectives sourced through all backlogs, roadmaps, and flow data and information (dependent)
• 90% of teams are using the solution to manage 100% of their capacity within the first year post implementation

Leading Indicators:

• Total value stream team member utilization > 95% daily vs. weekly vs. per PI
• Low daily utilization < 75% indicates there is a problem with the solution, training, or something else to explore
• % of teams using the ALM solution to manage 100% of their work and effort
• Number of changes in the [old solutions] data from the implementation start date
• Usage metrics for the [old solutions]
• We can see kanban systems and working agreements for workflow state entry and exit criteria in use in the system records
• Teams have a velocity metric that they use solely for the use of planning an iterations available capacity and not for measuring team performance (only useful for planning efficiency performance)
• Teams use velocity and flow metrics to make improvements to their system and flow (# of improvements acted from solution usage)
• Teams are able to measure the flow of items per cycle (sprint/iteration) and per effort/value (story points; additive)
• Program(s)[ARTs] are able to measure the flow of features per cycle (PI) and per effort/value (story points; additive from child elements)
• Portfolio(s) are able to measure the flow of epics per cycle (PI) and per effort/value (story points; additive from child elements)
• % of total work activity and effort in the portfolio visible in the solution
• Show the six flow metrics
• Features (Program) – current PI and two PI’s into the future
• Epics and Capabilities – current PI up to two+ years into the future
• are the things we said we were going to work on and what we actually worked on in relation to objectives and priorities (not just raw outputs of flow) the same?
• The portfolio has a reasonable and rationalized, quality understanding of how much capacity exists across current and future cycles (PI) in alignment with the roadmap
• Identification and reporting of capacity across Portfolio is accurate and predictable;
• Identification of Operational/Maintenance-to-Enhancement work ratio and work activity ratios and % complete and accurate (%C&A) data readily available in the system
• including operations and maintenance (O&M) work and enhancements,
• highlighting categories/types of work
• Work activity ratios are in alignment with process strategy and forecasts, process intent, and incentivizing business outcomes;
• allows leadership to address systemic issues;
• data is not just reported, but means something and is acted upon through decision-making and/or improvements
• # of epics created over time
• # of epics accepted over time
• # of MVP’s tested and successful
• Parameters configured in the tool to highlight and constrain anti-patterns
• Stimulates feedback loop to assist in making decisions on whether to refine/improve/refactor and in that case, what to refine/improve/refactor
• Strategic themes, objectives, key results, and the work in the portfolio – Epics, Capabilities, Features, Stories traceability conveyed from Enterprise to ART/Team level

Non-Functional Requirements

• On-Premise components of the ALM solution shall support 2-Factor Authentication
• SaaS components of the ALM solution shall support 2-Factor Authentication and SAML 2.0
• The system must be 508 compliant
• The system must be scalable to support up to 2000 users simultaneously with no performance degradation or reliability issues
• Must be the single-source system for all work performed in the portfolio and value streams.
• ALM is the single-source system of record for viewing and reporting roadmap status/progress toward objectives

Building your Experiment – The Minimum Viable Product (MVP)

Once you have constructed a quality hypothesis statement the product management team should begin work on building the lean business case and MVP concept. How are you going to test the hypothesis? How can we test the hypothesis adequately while also economically wrt to time, cost, and quality? What are the key features that will demonstrably support the hypothesis?

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Epical epic. Agile epic examples

What is an agile epic, what to use it for, and foremost how?

Requirements. Small, large, technical, business, operational, and researchable. And above all, plenty of them. During four years of ScrumDesk development, we have more than 800 requirements in our backlog. And these are the only requirements that we have decided to implement without any further ideas that would be nice to have. It is, of course, difficult to navigate such a long list without any additional organization of the backlog structure. And this is where Epic comes to help.

Every Scrum or Agile training introduces the term Epic. In training sessions, epics are presented by only using one image, and essentially, they are not even explained assuming their simplicity. It is not rocket science. However, the question emerges as soon as a product owner starts preparing a backlog of the product. How to organize epics? What are they supposed to describe? How to organize them?

Epic is a set of requirements that together deliver greater business value and touch the same portion of the product, either functional or logical.

Agile Epic, similar to the requirement itself (often User story), is supposed to deal with a problem of single or multiple users and at the same time should be usable and valuable.

How to identify epic?

It is no science at all. Start with thinking about a product from a large perspective. Agile epic is a large high-level functionality. Their size is large, usually in hundreds of story points. However, all these chunks of functionalities must be usable end to end. In practice, we have encountered multiple approaches to epic design. Let’s try to see which one is the best for you.

Epics are managed by product management or other strategic roles. For smaller products, Product Owners identify them. Agile epics help structure your work into valuable parts that can be developed faster while delivering value to users.

I. Epic as a part of the product

Epic can represent a large, high-level yet functional unit of the product. For example, in ScrumDesk we have epics BACKLOG, PLAN, WORK, REPORTS. In the app, you can find parts, and modules, which are called the same way as a given epic.

Top epics of the ScrumDesk product

This backlog organization is appropriate when you are creating a product that you are going to be developing in the long run.

Why use this method of epic organization?

• As a product owner, you simply have to be able to orientate yourself in parts of the product and know what you have or have not finished yet.
• At the same time, it is easy to measure progress by parts of the product.
• The Product Owner is naturally urged to change the order of features in the epic , which leads to the creation of rapid delivery of a minimum of viable product increments .

The disadvantage of this method is the lacking view of the user journey It is not visible which parts of the backlog cover what parts of the user value flow. E.g. process from registration, and basket to payment. Each part of the process can belong to a different epic.

Epics, in this case, do not end here, they are not concluded because the functional unit is delivered in the long term. In years. In the roadmap, the implementation of level features of individual epics is planned.

II. Epic as a part of the business flow

This approach is based on the fact, that we know the flow of values, meaning a business process that we can divide into individual parts and then make it more detailed and deliver iteratively. High-level functionalities follow the business workflows.

Epics by the business workflow

For example, an e-shop. Agile epics candidates would be:

• Product catalog viewing – for portraying categories of goods and a list of goods in each category, filtering and searching for goods.
• Product selection – a selection of interesting products such as favorites, comparing, pricing, or adding to a cart.
• The Cart of the products – browsing the content of a basket, comparing, and counting the total price.
• Payment – choice of payment options, total order, total price, shipping, the payment itself, and payment confirmation.
• Product delivery – a visual display of the delivery status, email, and SMS notifications.

The product owner is naturally able to focus on the delivery of the whole customer’s experience .  The first fully functional version is then created quite quickly and is subsequently improved iteratively. Epic Payment is based on VISA, transfer, and cash. In the first version, only Visa payment will be delivered, transfer and cash in the next one.

The development of epics takes a longer time in this case. It does not usually make sense to close them, as they will be further elaborated in the future by other features. Business easily understands the state of the implemented application (e-shop) which simplifies communication and significantly improves cooperation between IT and business. It is important to use commercial terms rather than technological ones.

III. Project as epic

Do you deliver products to a client in various phases and various projects? In this case, it may be easier to create epics according to projects or the project’s phases.

Epics as project or phase

Such epics are usually considered finished (closed) when the project is delivered. The advantage is obvious. There is an absolutely clear state of implementation of the project. Participants and stakeholders have excellent transparency. At the same time, stakeholders can focus on preparing for the next phase of the project.

On the other hand, it can be quite difficult to keep an overview of the functionalities units of the product itself. The state is more perceived by architects rather than the business itself. In real life, we also came across seeing this way to lead to a change in the company’s focus, or even to the degradation of its vision. A company that once wanted to act as a product and solution maker became a company fully listening to clients. Their products became a ‘toy’ in the hands of clients which led to people leaving teams because they have lost the personal connection with the product. They often lose the power to say NO.

It is also practical to use themes for further categorization of requirements . This creates a virtual matrix, in which each requirement belongs to a certain product set and also might belong to a business theme that is communicated to clients. In ScrumDesk we use, for example, themes for identifying clients who had requested larger sets of features, and we, after all, decided to include them in backlogs. As a product owner, I know how to communicate the status of requirements with a client while still keeping my eyes on the implementation of the product itself.

Epics and Themes

Themes in the product world are often determined by top management at strategic meetings and these topics are subsequently implemented in multiple value streams supported by multiple products. An example of such strategic themes can be 3D Maps, AI (Artificial Intelligence) in risky investments, and traveling without physical gates and cards.

Artificial Epics

In addition to business logic, an application has many parts that create a basic core of a product, but a customer rarely notices them.

First of all, you need to think about and register, for example, the design of architecture, suggestion of UX layout of an app, initial frameworks, and technological preparation. In later phases, the functionalities are still touching the entire product at once. E.g. logging, error handling etc. In ScrumDesk we had an epic called #APPLICATION for such requirements.

When we started four years ago, we decided to keep all bugs in epics titled #TECH. Symbol # indicates artificial epic.

Later we changed this strategy and now we are trying to put every requirement, regardless of its type, under the right epic, as the epic either repairs or expands, improves from the technological point of view.

Epic and business value

In Agile, each requirement should deliver additional business value. However, in the case of more complex applications, it is almost impossible to evaluate the value supplied at such a low level. In this case, it is easier to determine the business value at the level of epic . Epic then can analyze, suggest and prepare ahead of implementation itself beforehand.

It is also possible to create a business case and consequently the business value itself. Such an approach is recommended, for example, Scaled Agile Framework, in which the epic adds value to the selected value stream.

Epics in SAFe

How to prepare epics?

Product Owner prepares epics in advance, prior to planning and implementation.

For good preparation he needs support from multiple people:

• an architect for a rough design of the architecture that is needed to implement the epic,
• stakeholders, for whom the functionality will be delivered, for business value determination and business case,
• UX Designer to work out framework principles of interface design and usability of the epic,
• People from service and support for a good design of epic from the operational perspective,
• And whoever else is needed

PREARE EPICS IN SCRUMDESK FOR FREE

Preparation of an epic can, and often has a different process than the requirements themselves. In SAFe ‘Portfolio Kanban’ is recommended for the preparation of epics. Therefore, a separate Kanban board with multiple statuses exists on which the momentum of the epic realization is transparently displayed. This creates space for regular meetings of a small team preparing requirements ahead and continuous improvement of epic details.

Portfolio Kanban systems for epics management

The Product Owner basically works in two-time spaces. In the first one, he prepares epics for the future, and in the second he contributes to the implementation of already developed epics.

How ScrumDesk helps with epics?

ScrumDesk supports epics from its first version. As we use ScrumDesk for the development of the ScrumDesk, we identified and tried different approaches to backlog organization. In the first version epics were just titles, later we added possibilities to:

• add more details in the description of the epic,
• visualize epics as colored cards in user stories map,
• added an option to track the business value, risk, effort (as an aggregation of child requirements),
• break down epics into features and/or user stories to manage complex backlogs,
• track comments and changes,
• attach files (i.e. business cases),
• possibility to add the timeline for epics and features with the support of agile roadmaps displaying not just plans, but comparing them to reality as well.

Common mistakes

• Epic by technology layer. Database, backend, frontend. Functionality is not covered end-to-end, it only supplies parts of it.
• Epic by product version. The product version is a set of properties from different epics. Unlike the epic, the version has a timeline as well.
• Epic by a customer (stakeholder) to which part of the functionality is being delivered. If you need to evidence the customer, evidence it in a separate attribute and organize the epics according to the procedures above.
• When the product assumptions change, the form of epic organization will not readjust. Adapt and select appropriate approaches as needed. Do not be afraid to work with the backlog and change it so you can orient quickly, you can choose other ways of epics organization and especially to have it transparent for the team as well as stakeholders.
• https://www.flickr.com/photos/sebrendel/8155603332
• http://www.scaledagileframework.com/epic/
• http://www.scaledagileframework.com/portfolio-kanban/

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About the author: dusan kocurek.

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What is an epic in agile? Complete guide with examples

Agile development is an iterative process that enables software development teams to accelerate their time to market by fostering and embracing a culture of continuous learning. Agile teams learn by doing.

In product development, the strategy and roadmap is based on data and insights from the market, which is always evolving. The product team must be dynamic enough to adapt to shifting requirements and user needs. This is a core agile value as outlined in the Agile Manifesto .

It’s not enough to anticipate user needs because they are ever-evolving. Agile development teams work in short, iterative sprints , which affords them the flexibility and pragmatism required to deliver complex products.

What is an epic?

An epic is a feature or functionality consisting of multiple building blocks and scenarios. Epics are derived from themes or initiatives and can be segmented into smaller pieces called user stories .

An epic can span across multiple sprints, teams, and even projects. The theme, epic, and user stories share the same strategic goal at different levels of the focus area.

Consider the example of building a house. If an initiative is like building the ground floor, an epic is like creating a kitchen and a user story is like building a wall, with each brick being a task.

Agile development breaks down a broad product vision into small, achievable tasks that produce frequently updated results.

Like building a house, the product development lifecycle can feel overwhelming. The direction of where to start may not be apparent to everyone working on the product. But it helps to break down the larger initiative into several themes — for example, building the foundation and the ground floor.

You can break it down further into epics — e.g., building each room — and then even further to building a wall. This gives us a clearer picture of what we need to achieve today to make meaningful progress toward the strategic initiative .

In large organizations, where several cross-functional teams are involved in product development, epics help everyone get on the same page around development goals, dependencies, and priorities.

Epics vs. user stories vs. initiatives

Depending on the organization’s size, the product’s complexity, the composition of initiatives, themes, and epic may vary in dimensions. Smaller products or organizations may only have one top hierarchy. However, if the design of scale is used within the circumference of an organization, the basic idea is the same.

A product roadmap boils down to smaller, achievable tasks. In any product development cycle, multiple features concurrently fulfill users’ needs. But that doesn’t mean the product needs to be fully developed with all features complete at the time of launch .

A core value of agile development is quick delivery and learning by doing. Breaking the theme into various levels helps shorten the product development lifecycle from ideation to execution.

This segmentation also helps in prioritization by slicing the initiative into more manageable minimum viable products (MVPs) . The MVPs can be developed and launched to the user within a short period, allowing the team to learn and iterate, validate ideas, and adjust the roadmap as necessary.

Regardless of how you structure the hierarchy structure of themes/initiatives, epics, and user stories, each level is defined with a purpose.

Themes and initiatives

Themes and initiatives define the product vision. The big idea is segmented into strategic goals.

The purpose of the theme is to be the North Star, providing a clear picture of the entire organization’s focus area.

The initiative can be closing a market gap, addressing a pain point, innovation, market fit, etc.

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An epic is the actualization of the product roadmap. The initiative is further segmented into defined features to develop.

Epics create alignment between the organization and the product development when it comes to prioritization .

User stories

A user story is user-focused and driven by user value.

Even though the product vision and roadmap come from within the organization, development should always be completely user-centric. User stories help the development team empathize with the user and clarify the value produced as a result of the product from the customer’s perspective.

How to write an epic

An epic is a high-level requirement of a feature. When writing an epic, your goal is to align stakeholders with your product vision and roadmap. To achieve that alignment with clarity and focus, you should provide all the relevant information, including any dependencies, clarify any misunderstandings, and establish a clear direction with a measurable goal.

Collaboration is key to a good epic description. Though the product manager is responsible for writing an epic spec, they’re not expected to be an expert at all levels. When creating an epic spec document, collaborate with your team to discuss and align on solution design, UX design, and the customer journey. Bring in all the required knowledge and expertise early to avoid getting stuck later on.

What to include in an epic

Every development is different, so the epic specs will differ from product to product. Some epics include granular detail while others only highlight high-level requirements.

An epic should include at least the bare minimum information the product team requires to get started on user stories and prioritize tasks to solve the customer’s needs as efficiently as possible.

Introduction

The introduction should outline the “why” and the “what” — the reason for prioritizing and developing the feature and user pain points to solve. You should also include the metrics and KPIs for measuring the performance.

In addition, any documentation or early wireframes you can provide go a long way toward establishing a common understanding of the goal and path to successful delivery. Some things to consider:

• Summary of features and reasons for developing them
• Performance metrics and KPIs
• Links to specific documentation
• Marketing plans and legal requirements (if any)
• Early wireframes

Product requirements

An essential objective of the epic is to establish a shared understanding of the development goal. The epic should include the feature’s functional and nonfunctional requirements.

The product requirements documentation might mention availability in multiple languages or on multiple devices, for example.

Design requirements

You should always collaborate with the UX designer to write the design requirement. They are the expert and will surely have insights to share from their countless user test experiences.

Examples of product design requirements might include things like:

• Where to place search functionality for each device
• A request for a prototype to simplify future group discussions

Engineering requirements

You should strive for alignment with the target architecture while compiling the high-level requirement in an epic. Like the tech stack or solution design, consideration in the early stages will help you estimate more accurately and maximize efficiency down the line.

For example, let’s say the engineering team wants to create an API to integrate with some existing database functionality to fetch a list of songs. Investigating these opportunities during the initial stages of creating the epic helps you avoid incurring inadvertent technical debt .

KPI and metrics

KPIs guide every product development cycle. A concrete set of metrics and goals will help the teams focused and motivated to hit stated objectives.

KPIs should be tangible and measurable. A vague KPI is of no value and does not motivate action. At first, some KPIs may seem not measurable, but after aligning with data analysts, there is always a way to measure development value in numbers.

For example, increasing customer satisfaction is a good KPI, but a little vague. Instead, try adding metrics such as net promoter score (NPS) or the number of times a user interacts with a new functionality in one session.

A real-world example of an epic

Let’s consider the example of a music streaming app to demonstrate how an epic is structured. Suppose you want to add search functionality to the app. The database contains more than 1 million songs from across the globe — a key differentiator for your product, so the search functionality is deemed critical to enable users to find whatever music they are looking for intuitively.

Using the epic template below, our epic would look something like this:

Keeping with this example, an epic spec document pertaining to the items populating the template above might read as follows:

The new search functionality will allow users to narrow down their search and offer suggestions to help them find the music they want to listen to instantly.

Our research shows that 86 percent of our user base is interested in the search functionality. Since the most commonly identified problem with searching music is that people can’t remember or recognize the song’s name, a voice search service shows the most considerable demand.

We expect this functionality will increase the number of songs played per user by 10 percent on average, which will result in approximately 30 percent additional time spent per month using the app.

• Users can initiate a search from multiple suitable pages in the app
• Users can begin a voice search
• AI integration in search functionality
• Customized search suggestions
• Should include tracking on each page
• Display search suggestions in a list filtered is different categories
• Design should work with accessibility rules
• New API’s to be built only in the new backend system
• Dependencies shared with the AI integration team
• Conversion rate: Clicks on the suggested list of songs
• Use of voice search: Avg. use per session per user

A good epic spec document will help you foster collaboration and achieve alignment across your team and your organization. Epics also make it easier to write user stories, slice down and prioritize the backlog, and run a smoother scrum .

In agile development, all the frameworks, structures, and processes are created with one principle: the ability to be flexible and deliver quickly to learn iteratively.

The main goal of any process or documentation is to create alignment, avoid misunderstanding, and minimize inadvertent technical debts while accelerating time to market.

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What Is An Agile Epic? Best Practices, Template & Example

I am a senior product manager with 15 years experience in a variety of companies, amongst them some of the best practice Product companies in the world like eBay and Guardian News & Media. In my varied roles I have worked in companies of various sizes and at different stages of maturity of their Product Management organizations. I have been the first product manager of the company in several of my roles and tackled introducing Product Management into a business. My other passion is User Experience. I undertook an MSc degree in Human-Centred Systems at City University London from 2010-2012. The combination of Product Management and User Experience means that user insight is always at the heart of my work. I believe that real-life Product Management can be quite daunting and the solutions to numerous challenges cannot always be found in textbooks. I hope that sharing my own experiences of what works in real life helps product managers to succeed and their products to thrive.

Agile epics are a crucial tool for grouping user stories into bigger initiatives and structure an agile backlog. Here are some pro tips on how you can use epics to their full potential.

Do you know the difference between an agile epic and a user story ? Or how to best use agile epics for your product requirements and product roadmap? If you’d like to learn how to use agile epics to your advantage, read on for my top seven tips and a template to start.

What Is An Agile Epic?

An agile epic is a useful tool in agile project management used to structure your agile backlog and roadmap.

Simply put, an agile epic is a collection of smaller user stories that describe a large work item. Consider an epic a large user story. For example, epics are often used to describe a new product feature or bigger piece of functionality to be developed.

An epic is the top informational level in an agile backlog. It contains several user stories and each user story in turn contains all the tasks required for implementation.

Agile epics are mostly used when a piece of work is too big to be delivered in a single sprint or iteration. If you use an epic to group your user stories for a new feature, it is easy to keep track of progress and know what percentage of work is completed versus outstanding. 

Epics are usually written and maintained by the product owner or product manager. 

7 Best Practices To Using Agile Epics

There is no set template for an agile epic. You can write it in any way you like as long as it helps with planning your work and communication with your agile teams and stakeholders. 

Regardless if you use a scrum or kanban or a hybrid development process, epics will help you plan your work and report on it.

Here are some tips to make sure that your agile epics are most useful. 

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1. Start With Epic Then Stories (Top Down)

Finding your epics can very usefully be done with a user story map . Your top level “Activity” in the user story map becomes an epic and the lower levels become the user stories, tasks, and acceptance criteria . 

When you are developing a whole new product, starting with epics and fleshing them out in more detail as you go along, gives you an idea of the milestones completed and outstanding. 

Often agile epics correspond to features or larger improvements (e.g. a redesign of part of your product), but it is entirely up to you how you want to structure your epics. 

2. Name An Epic Well

When you name your agile epics, think about who will consume this information. For example, your agile development teams need to understand what they are building and your stakeholders also need to understand your progress. 

Whereas a user story describes an end-user need, it’s good practice if the epic describes an outcome you want to achieve with it.

Consider these examples for epic names:

• Checkout flow V2
• Streamline checkout flow
• Increase conversion rate in checkout

The first name doesn’t describe at all what it is other than some kind of work on checkout. The second name is better as it describes that the checkout flow is to be streamlined. But the third name is even better as it includes an outcome that you want to achieve with this streamlining. 

In agile management tools, like Atlassian’s Jira for example, epics can be used for filtering, grouping, and reporting. Therefore choosing a name that speaks for itself is important.

3. Make Your Epics The Right Size

An epic is usually used when work on a backlog item requires more than a single sprint to complete. An epic can break down into as many user stories as you like as long as you can keep track of the whole list. 

An epic should be not too big and not too small. A rule of thumb would be an implementation timeframe between a few weeks and a few months. This is a good size for reporting on the percentage completed. 

Making epics too big means that progress is very slow, percentages hardly increase over a two-week sprint and reporting is not meaningful. Also if an epic takes too long to implement, there are likely to be so many changes to requirements along the way that reporting progress almost becomes meaningless. 

Making epics too small means that you will have a great number of them to juggle in your backlog or roadmap. It can become difficult to retain a high-level view of many smaller tasks. Also if epics are completed in a very short time (e.g. a single sprint), they just add additional overhead without providing much value. 

4. Use Epics To Structure Your Backlog

Epics are an excellent way to structure a product backlog that usually consists of a very long list of user stories. Not every story requires to be included in an epic, as small pieces of work are simply completed within one sprint. But to structure bigger items of work into epics has two main benefits:

• It provides a high-level view of the big items in your backlog,
• As the size of an epic is made up of the addition of story points of all its user stories, epics also provide a comparison of the relative size of initiatives for prioritization . 

The list of epics can also be used to create a high-level view of a product roadmap for senior management.

5. Use Epics To Coordinate Multiple Teams

Epics can be very useful to coordinate chunks of work across multiple agile software development teams. Combining work for multiple product teams in a single epic allows you to break down the reporting per team and track progress overall. 

6. Include Success Metrics

When defining an epic it is worthwhile thinking about what success metric can be associated with it. Ultimately all product deliverables serve to bring value to end-users. Including a success metric in your epic means that development team members and stakeholders all understand what you are trying to achieve with this piece of work. 

Some companies use OKRs to set quarterly goals. Referencing an OKR metric in an epic is an excellent way to tie an epic back to the business objectives. 

7. Make Epics Flexible In Scope

As an epic describes a high-level work item continuing over several weeks or months, it is likely that new insight arises or new technical complications are discovered as work progresses. Therefore an epic needs to be flexible in scope. 

The scope of an epic is defined by the scope of its associated user stories, usually measured in story points.  As new requirements emerge, new user stories may be added and the scope of the epic increases.

Related Read: Best Agile Product Management Software

Agile Epic Template 

There is no set format for an epic, but a few things are useful as described above.

• Choose a good name that speaks for itself.
• In the description,  give a rough outline of what the epic encompasses. Reference any company goals to illustrate how this ties in with business priorities.
• The success metric describes specifically what will be measured after completion of this epic.
• Big user story denotes a user story at the level of the whole epic. This is very useful in order to document how this epic delivers a better user experience.  

Agile Epic Example

Here is an example of an epic for a new streamlined mobile app checkout flow in order to increase conversion. 

Within this epic, we could then have user stories such as:

• Integrate Apple Pay ( “As a buyer, I want to pay with one touch on my phone so that I can complete checkout quickly” )
• Use billing address as shipping address per default ( “As a buyer, I want to enter my address details only once so that I can complete checkout quickly” )

Agile epics are a flexible tool in your agile toolkit. When starting a major new development, think about the big pieces of work required to complete it and define a few epics. You can then create all your user stories within these epics as you go along and retain a much better overview than in an unstructured backlog. 

Epics can be used in many ways. I would be very interested to learn how you use epics in your agile teams in the comments. 

For more articles with hands-on practical information about a great variety of product management topics—including agile methodology!— subscribe to our newsletter .

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How to Write an Epic (for Product Managers)

What is an epic.

An epic in product management is a group of related development tasks between high-level strategic themes and actionable user stories.

You can think of an epic in two ways:

1.) The top-down view:

An epic is a body of work that a product team devises as they break down a strategic theme into smaller initiatives. A theme on your product roadmap might contain two or more epics.

2.) The bottom-up view:

An epic is a body of work representing a group of user stories sharing a common strategic goal. Several related stories on the roadmap will often roll up to a single epic.

What is an Example of an Epic in Product Management?

Look at the graphic at the top of this page. It represents a section of a hypothetical software company’s product roadmap. Let’s review the details to see how the epics fit into the team’s strategy, which flows from one central theme.

THEME: Increase the number of people using our free trial

To achieve this goal, the product team has identified two epics. We’ll examine just the first one and the user stories that flow from it.

EPIC: Simplify the trial download process

As you can see, this epic represents a subset of the theme to bring in more trial users. But the work required here, to simplify the trial download process, is more than a development team can complete in a single sprint.

For this reason, the team must further break down this epic into user stories that the developers can complete in one sprint.

USER STORY #1: Shorten the signup form

The product team believes trial usage has been low because the current signup form contains too many questions. It turns off visitors.

Following this user story, the team will cut out all but the necessary lead-collection questions. The form might ask only for the user’s full name and email address.

USER STORY #2: Move the signup form from our site into the app itself.

The product team has identified another challenge in their trial process. When users click the “TRY IT FREE” button, they encounter the signup form right away. They have not yet invested time in starting the download process, so they are more likely to abandon the form.

The team would like to let users make progress accessing the trial version before filling out the form. They can download the app, install it on their computer, and see the product interface on their screen. Then, before they can perform any action with the product, they’ll need to complete the form.

This way, users have already invested time and effort in starting the trial. They can also see that they can start using the app immediately after they’ve finished the form.

Bottom line: A product team develops an epic by breaking down a high-level product theme into more manageable components. Then, they will need to break down each epic into actionable tasks, the user stories.

How to Write an Epic?

There are many ways you can write an epic. But most approaches have a few steps every day. Let’s walk through them.

Step 1: Name the epic.

Before you can start planning the details of the epic, you need to give it a clear, concise title.

On the hypothetical roadmap above, the product team identified two strategic actions to help achieve their theme of increasing trial downloads. For one of those strategies, they named the epic “Simplify download process.”

You want to start your epic writing process with the name because it helps clarify your strategic goals. You will also find it helpful to have a standard way of describing the strategy. It will reduce confusion and miscommunication among your team .

Step 2: Write a narrative explaining the epic.

Next, you will write a short description of what you hope to achieve with the epic. This narrative should contain at least the following:

1. Who: the persona (in this case, the product manager )

2. What: your objective

3. Why: the value behind the objective

Here is a template you can use to fill in the details:

As the [product manager] , I want to [simplify the trial download experience] so that [we increase the number of people who complete the trial download process] .

Pro tip: You can also include another sentence or two with background information that helps explain why this epic matters.

For example, in our hypothetical, you might include a note about your research, which includes:

• Current abandon rates on your trial download web page
• Data indicating these abandon rates are higher than the industry average
• Data showing that your signup form contains more fields than the industry average

Step 3: Establish the scope for the epic.

You will now want to jot down the scope of work for this epic—in other words, the boundaries. The range of work will help your team to stay on track.

Going back to our hypothetical, “Simplify the download process,” you might want to specify:

• Which trial downloads to focus on
• Which form fields to eliminate (and which to keep)
• Where you wish to relocate the form

Step 4: Define completion for the epic.

As a product manager, your team will need to know when to define completion for the epic. You will also need to write a clear set of acceptance criteria—the high-level list of requirements your team will need to approve. With our hypothetical, this acceptance criteria would include:

• The development team can confirm that we can track the abandon rate in the app, where we’ve moved the form.

Step 5: Break the epic down into stories.

At this point, you’ve technically completed and understand how to write an epic in product management. The epic writing phase is complete. You are now ready for the next stage: writing the user stories. But we include this as step 5 to show you how epic creation should flow naturally into writing actionable tasks that your developers can add to their next sprint.

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Epic Problem Statement

When solving complex problems at scale, we use epics, features, and stories to align, focus, and coordinate the work of multiple teams to achieve the objectives of our organizations. 

An epic represents the investment decision to solve a tangible problem; a collection of epics together represent a broader investment decision to advance the organization’s strategy.  Most of the teams I’ve worked with in the past few years initially think about their epics in the wrong way – and once we change together how they write problem statements, it unlocks their potential to achieve great things on their own.

The Job of An Epic

A well-constructed epic achieves two objectives

• An epic aligns your teams on intent – why are we making this investment and how will we know we are done?
• An epic communicates the context of general approach – at a high level, what will we create and improve to make achieving our goals possible?

A group of epics collectively represents the purpose of a body of work the teams will perform in a period of time. Our executives validate the body of work as matching the ambition of their initiative.  Together with them, we create the epic roadmap to align and allocate the organization’s capacity to the pursuit of our strategy.  This coherence check is the first important alignment activity required to assure the organization is effectively executing on the vision of the organization.

For you to agree with my assertion about the job of the epic, you need to know the jobs of the feature and the story – to assure yourself this approach collectively gets all of the jobs of the system done.

A well constructed feature describes our approach to creating or improving a capability which we believe is necessary to realize the intended outcomes of an epic.  Any given epic will be achieved through the development of multiple features.  Each feature provides sufficient specificity to enable the organization to understand and orchestrate dependencies across the teams doing the work – and likewise provides enough information for the team to know how “good enough” will be judged – a definition of done.

An effective user story describes the user’s goal, when & why they have the goal, and how they judge their success at achieving their goal.  A collection of user stories aligned to a given feature reflect the necessary adaptation of those user goals, given the constraints of what we build to enable them to realize their goals; given the features we might choose to build and the way we would choose to build them.

The Job of the Problem Statement

In any organization, an artifact exists to support activities – creation, collaboration, coordination, and communication .  [Hat tip to Laura and Kate for the inspiration (in a discussion on the purposes of designers’ deliverables )]  An epic is no different – and we use it for each of the 4 C’s, at different times, with different people, for different purposes.  In support of those activities, we rely on the epic as a container of “intention.” A good epic organizes the description of intent such that it enables teams to support conversations around three key questions:

• What is the problem we are solving for the company with this epic?
• What is the value of this epic, assuming we solve the problem we intend to solve?
• What changes in behavior will we observe in the short term which assure us we are solving the problem we intend to solve?

The problem statement has responsibility for the first of those three – aligning with our executive sponsor on the problem to be solved.  

The problem statement is primarily a creation tool – for a product manager, properly framing the problem which truly needs to be solved is the vanguard of thinking steps in providing clarity in the backlog.  Understanding what truly needs to be accomplished is an experience of epiphany and insight; a moment of clarity.

The problem statement is secondarily  a communication tool – an elevator pitch for the epic.  Our leaders rely on us to deeply understand the context in which we make choices which make plans real .  Through the problem statement we can collaborate to achieve a shared understanding of how the teams will realize the vision.

A well written problem statement provides clarity on why an epic is valuable to the organization.  Primarily, we use this to assure completeness and correctness between a collection of epics and the initiative.  When we are misaligned, we leverage the problem statement in collaboration with our executive to achieve both alignment with and comprehensive coverage of the opportunities we are pursuing.  This alignment is a key element of strategy deployment – making sure nothing is missed , and none of the work is likely to be misaligned .  

An Effective Structure for the Problem Statement

On more than one occasion I’ve heard an effective product or business leader refer to structured artifacts as “mad libs” (and not in a good way ).  A mad lib, while fun to read, is not actually coherent or useful – arbitrary terms inserted into fields creates nonsense.  Forcing people to restructure nonsense thinking into a good format initially results in well-organized nonsense.  All is not lost, however, as this is also the first step on a journey of improvement.

We gradually adapt to the structures around us.  Forcing teams to use a fixed structure for writing problem statements is an effective way to make progress addressing the system-level problem of developing the organizational capability of collaborative problem solving.  

In the Shu Ha Ri approach to change , adoption of the structure is achieving shu-level performance.  When our problem statement includes the right elements, it improves.  Upon that improvement we can begin the journey of improving the inputs to the structure – making better choices about what problems to solve.

A Good Problem Statement has Four Elements

• A definition of the problem we intend to solve   –  this is the “why” of our product or enhancement.
• Identification of the users who are affected by the problem – this is the “who” of our product.
• Identification of the consequences of leaving the problem unsolved – this is the “pain” we are addressing with our product.
• An Imagining of a future where the problem is solved – this is an envisioning which provides multiple benefits in both completeness and correctness.

These four elements are important because we need our executives to align around concrete purpose – achieving a shared understanding of the problem, why it is important to solve, and what good enough looks like.  When teams do work which does not advance the solution of the identified problem, that work is waste.  When teams do more work than is needed to solve the problem, that work is also waste.  A well structured problem statement helps prevent both irrelevant features and gold plating.

When we activate our teams to “build the things” we are introducing waste because those things are always misaligned to the problems we need to solve.  It is critical, we instead align our teams around solving the problems.  The appropriate things to build will be discovered when it is appropriate.  And the things we choose to build can be easily changed when we realize different things are required.  All without changing direction – we are still focused on solving the problem.

• When we organize around the problems we choose to solve, instead of the solution ideas, we more effectively activate our teams, eliminate waste, and deliver predictably.
• Epics represent investment decisions to realize value (to ‘solve the problems which prevent realization of value’).
• Problem statements help us in choosing the right problems, and help us in aligning our problem choices with our strategic intent.

In future articles, I hope to write about applying techniques (like using “How Might We?…”) to improve the problems we choose to solve.  For now, we can all realize the systemic benefits which arise from using this approach to describe the problems we have chosen.

Scott Sehlhorst is a product management and strategy consultant with over 30 years of experience in engineering, software development, and business. Scott founded Tyner Blain in 2005 to focus on helping companies, teams, and product managers build better products. Follow him on LinkedIn, and connect to see how Scott can help your organization.

2 thoughts on “ Epic Problem Statement ”

Hi Scott, Thanks for exploring the use of problem statements to build a shared understanding of the problem you’re trying to solve.

I also find that templates can be a double edged sword. Bad if they are thoughtlessly filled in, very helpful if they are used to guide conversations.

I’ve written up the technique I like to use to guide a conversation around the four bits of a problem statement here: https://www.kbp.media/problem-statement/ and linked to this post in the additional references.

Excellent, Kent. Love your stuff as always!

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• September 25, 2024

Developing a Winning Epic Hypothesis Statement that Captivates Stakeholders using SAFe

• Agile Scrum Tutorials
• March 21, 2024
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Table of Contents

The Scaled Agile Framework®, or SAFe, was created in 2011 and built upon the classic Agile manifesto by incorporating key ideas from the Lean methodology.

Organisations using this framework can accomplish a wide range of advantages, according to SAFe developers, such as:

20-50% increases in productivity

30-75% quicker time to market

10-50%Increases in employee engagement

Assume that in order to reap the benefits of project management, your Executive Action Team (EAT) wants to embrace a Lean-Agile mentality. If so, it needs to become proficient in crafting and presenting an Epic Hypothesis Statement (EHS). Check out the Agile certification course to learn more.

Creating a strong EHS and persuading your stakeholders to embrace your bold idea are crucial to attaining business agility and optimising development procedures. On the other hand, neglecting to do so will impede your pipeline for continuous delivery and hinder you from effectively creating functional software.

It’s imperative that you nail your EHS pitch because there is a lot riding on it. We’ve developed this useful tool to assist you pitch your Epic Hypothesis Statement to your EAT in order to support these efforts.

What Is an Executive Action Team (EAT)?

One of the cross-functional teams in the SAFe framework is the Executive Action Team (EAT). This group drives organisational transformation and eliminates barriers to systemic advancement. Additionally, the EAT will hear your EHS and choose whether or not to add it to the Epic queue.

The idea that change must originate at the top is one of the fundamental tenets of the lean-agile approach. An effective EHS pitch will pique the interest of Executive Action Team stakeholders and persuade them to adopt your Epic Hypothesis Statement.

What Is an Epic Hypothesis Statement (EHS)?

A comprehensive hypothesis that outlines an epic or sizable undertaking intended to overcome a growth impediment or seize a growth opportunity is called the Epic Hypothesis Statement (EHS).

Epics are typically customer-facing and always have a large scale. They need to assist a business in meeting its present requirements and equip it to face obstacles down the road.

The Epic Hypothesis Statement (EHS) is typically delivered to the EAT in the style of an elevator pitch: it is brief, simple, and concise, although the statement itself will be highly thorough.

Key Components of an Epic Hypothesis Statement

The Portfolio Kanban system’s initial funnelling phase is expanded upon in the Epic Hypothesis Statement. The concept started out as just one, like “adding self-service tools to the customer’s loan management portal.”

You must refine this fundamental concept into a fully realised endeavour in your role as the Epic Owner. In the event that your theory is verified, you must also describe the anticipated advantages the firm will enjoy. Your EHS also has to have leading indications that you can track as you move toward validating your hypotheses.

Let’s expand on the example of the self-service tool.

You could expand on the basic premise of integrating self-service capabilities into the loan management portal that is visible to customers if you wanted to develop an EHS. Indicate which specific tools you want to use and how they will enhance the client journey in your explanation of the initiative.

For example, the following could be considered expected benefit outcomes of this initiative:

• A reduction in calls to customer service
• Better customer satisfaction and engagement
• improved image of the brand

It’s true that some advantages would be hard to measure. Complementary objectives and key results (OKRs) are therefore quite important to include in your EHS since they will support your pitch to your EAT regarding the benefits of your EHS.

Pitching Your EHS

It’s time to submit your finished Epic Hypothesis Statement to the EAT for consideration. You need to do the following if you want to involve your stakeholders.

Make Use of Powerful Visuals

The Agile manifesto and the Portfolio Kanban system both stress the value of visualisation. Including images in your EHS pitch demonstrates to your audience that you understand these approaches in their entirety and aids with their understanding of your concept.

Explain the Applicability of Your OKRs

Your suggested endeavour and the OKRs you’ve chosen should be clearly connected. Nevertheless, it never hurts to emphasise this point by outlining how each OKR you select will assist in monitoring the advancement of your theory’s proof.

Close the Deal with a Powerful Concluding Statement

Your Epic Hypothesis Statement is ultimately a sales pitch. Handle it as such by providing a succinct yet captivating conclusion. Go over the possible advantages of your project again, and explain why you think it will help the business achieve its short- and long-term objectives.

The Perfect EHS Pitch Starts with a Great Idea

By utilising the aforementioned strategies and recommendations, you can create an extensive EHS that grabs the interest of your stakeholders. But never forget that the quality of your idea will determine how well your pitch goes.

Work with your EAT to integrate ideas that have a significant impact into your workflow for managing your portfolio. Next, choose a notion you are enthusiastic about and develop your hypothesis around it. You’ll have no trouble crafting the ideal EHS pitch.

Conclusion  To learn more about Agile and SAFe, check out the SAFe Agile certification course online.

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SAFe lean business case template

By scaled agile, inc..

Create a lean business case for your portfolio epic based on SAFe agile practices

KEY FEATURES

Having one standardized and organized method to keep track of all of your portfolio epics is essential to successful  lean portfolio management . Moreover, adopting SAFe practices allows you to manage opportunities and risks via lean business cases that are implemented through the  build-measure-learn SAFe Lean Startup Cycle . With this template, you’ll be able to document a business case based on a benefit hypothesis and a defined MVP, rather than a speculative ROI that would require the full potential investment. With Confluence, you can organize all of your portfolio epic documentation in one space, making it easy to analyze inputs, record decisions, and keep everyone aligned to a common objective. Read more on the  SAFe epic article .

• Why Confluence?

How to use the SAFe lean business case template

Step 1. determine the scope and details of the epic..

The creation of the business case is usually the primary responsibility of the epic owner. Before diving into the creation of your lean business case, set the stage for this portfolio epic. Make sure you are creating the lean business case at the right time. It is part of the analyzing phase of the  portfolio Kanban  system. Too early would create waste, and too late risks making investments without understanding the context. First, decide who will be involved in the proposal, to ensure that all sponsoring stakeholders are included. Then, concisely describe the epic, define how the success of the epic will be measured in the Business Outcomes Hypothesis, and establish what leading indicators will be used to indicate progress. This will help you determine the scope of the epic, and most importantly, how to define your MVP. Make sure to include any background analyses you conducted, and leave space to capture the final go/no-go recommendation.

Step 2. Create the lean business case.

Once you’ve laid down the groundwork, you’re ready to write the lean business case. Start by using the  Epic Hypothesis Statement  to describe the epic. This provides a short and concise way to define the business rationale, or the “why” of this Epic. Then define what is in and out of scope for this epic, as well as any nonfunctional requirements. Then define the MVP that will be used to test the hypothesis, as well as potential features this MVP will spawn Estimate the cost, preferably in the same currency used to run  participatory budgeting . Don’t forget to provide an estimate of the overall cost of the Epic, once the MVP is successful. Lastly, document the kind of value return that is expected from the investment in the epic.

Step 3. Document any supporting data.

Document the solution analysis that was carried out during the analyzing phase. Reference any additional resources, links, and supporting evidence so other team members and stakeholders can access it easily. Ensure that the attachments are labeled, using the Notes and Comments section to jot down any miscellaneous evidence. All of this informs the upcoming go/no-go decision. Be careful of information overload. The lean business case was created to make the process of laying out a business case faster and to make the review process easier. Attaching too many support documents in this field can slow down the reviewers and negate some of the benefits.  Alternatively, this space can be used to document notes during your team planning meetings.

Step 4. Keep the epic up to date.

As analysis and implementation of the MVP continue, keep the lean business case up to date to facilitate any portfolio review meetings or future portfolio funding.

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