Big user stories

Sometimes as a product owner you run into the problem of having to deliver a large piece of a project.  As mentioned on a previous post you want to avoid going to technical and constraining a dev team to follow what you’ve written when instead a story is the beginning of a conversation and isn’t a commitment to exactly how something should be done.  With a user story though you don’t want it to be too big and so you need to break it down into manageable parts. 

If for example you need your team to create a new micro-service to process requests for information you don’t want to write a story that doesn’t create any value once completed.  An example of this would be writing a story that addresses the need to create a database for a user to send, receive, and update information from.  Instead you’d write a story that starts perhaps with the first part of the process, i.e. send data.  With this broken out into its own story it should be discussed with the dev team that while we know that doesn’t encompass creating a database, receiving info, or updating info they will inherently know or be explicitly told that a database needs to be created in order to complete this story.  It should be noted that the very first story will also be front loaded with initial set up and configuration of other things and so it may be larger than subsequent stories.  That is ok though because we want a story to be able to stand on its own in terms of value being delivered even if it is only one portion of data being worked on, in this case sending information.