User Stories are centered around the user persona, which seems like a good idea, but it would be better if they were centered on a business outcome.

Consider the Publish button in WordPress.

One way to write a specification for this is to mock that screenshot I pasted above in Figma and say what the button does when clicked. Perhaps you’d use the typical User Story format and add “As a writer, I want to publish posts, so I can share it with readers.”

That works well in the sense that the production software will probably do what was specified. But, we’ve lost an opportunity. The story is focussed on a persona, but doesn’t emphasize the goal. I’m not even sure the persona matters at all here.

And just like no one wants a drill, I don’t want to publish. I want to influence readers. Others might want ad revenue or newsletter subscribers or to sell books. So, can we take the opportunity in this story to remind everyone about the business goals? The final state is not a published post.

It seems like a small tweak, but I’d word it “To get readers, a post must first be published.”

And now it’s obvious that this is insufficient. Yes, we need a Publish button, but that won’t accomplish the goal. This wording begs for more features to support the actual goal. It also implies that the metric for the success of the Publish button is the number of readers not (for example) the number of published posts. How would the design of publishing in WordPress be different if it was centered around the business goal of the users?

Publishing should lead directly to distribution, but in actual WordPress, the end of the publish step is a button to copy the link.

I guess I’ll go tweet it myself.