Epics & Features: the framework for your product development

In Agile environments like Scrum or Kanban, you often have many ideas and improvements you ultimately want to realize. To prevent getting lost in a sea of disconnected user stories, you work with epics and features. These provide coherence to your backlog and help you keep the big picture in mind. At Spark Academy, we notice that teams who effectively use these structures prioritize better and achieve valuable results faster.

‍

What are epics?

An epic is a large-scale, often complex user story that you cannot complete in a single sprint. You can see it as an overarching goal or theme, such as ‘users can make online payments’ or ‘a new mobile app for all customers’. An epic is too large to tackle directly; therefore, you divide it into smaller chunks (features or user stories) that are manageable for the team.

‍

What are features?

Features are concrete pieces of functionality that stem from your epics. Suppose you have an epic ‘online payments’: within that, you could have features like ‘select payment options’, ‘optimize payment screen’, or ‘log payment transactions’. These features are still relatively extensive, but more manageable than the entire epic at once.

‍

Working with epics and features

An epic serves as an umbrella for related features and user stories. This creates a hierarchy where epics represent the big goal, features describe medium-sized components, and user stories are the detailed tasks you can tackle in a sprint. This helps you to:

• Maintain an overview: You can see at a glance which parts of a larger goal are already complete and which are still in development.
• Prioritization: If you know that one epic is crucial for the product launch, you can place the associated features at the top of the backlog.
• Working incrementally: Instead of one giant project, you tackle a part of the epic at a time and deliver value incrementally.

‍

How the Scrum Master helps with this

The Product Owner is formally responsible for managing epics and features, but the Scrum Master can facilitate by:

• Refinement sessions: Discussing with the team how epics can be broken down into features or user stories, creating workable pieces.
• Ensuring transparency: Making sure everyone on the team understands how the epics and features fit into the bigger picture.
• Maintaining focus: If an epic is too large or threatens to go over scope, the Scrum Master can point out that it's time to further reduce the scope.

‍

Epics and features bring structure to your product development and ensure your team isn't overwhelmed by a massive backlog. By breaking down large goals into manageable parts, you maintain control over progress and can respond more quickly to changes. That's the core of agile working: delivering and learning step-by-step, while keeping the big picture in sight.

‍