Winning Strategy

Winning Strategy

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Winning Strategy
Winning Strategy
Is Your User Story Too Big to Fit in a Sprint? Here's What You Can Do.
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Agility Track

Is Your User Story Too Big to Fit in a Sprint? Here's What You Can Do.

What to do when your user story remains big after splitting?

Vibhor Chandel's avatar
Vibhor Chandel
Jan 09, 2025
∙ Paid
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Winning Strategy
Winning Strategy
Is Your User Story Too Big to Fit in a Sprint? Here's What You Can Do.
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Hello 👋, It’s Vibhor. Welcome to the 🔥 paid member only🔥 edition of Winning Strategy: A newsletter focused on enhancing product, process, team, and career performance. Many subscribers expense this newsletter to their Learning & Development budget. Here’s an expense template to send to your manager.


Imagine this.

Your team is nearing the end of a Sprint.

The backlog refinement session is underway, and you're working with the team to break down a high-priority item for the next Sprint.

However, no matter how hard you try, the user story remains massive. You've already attempted splitting it into smaller, more manageable pieces, yet it still feels too big.

As a Scrum Master, this situation can be pretty frustrating.

You may wonder whether you're missing something fundamental or if there's a better way to approach the problem. Splitting stories is a skill that takes practice, but even experienced teams sometimes encounter stories that seem impossible to break down.

What can you do?

In this post, I will give you:

  1. the logic

  2. the mindset shift

  3. the solution, and

  4. an example walkthrough

to fix this for good.

By the end of this guide, you will have a clear approach to handling big user stories like these while remaining aligned with what we call “Agility.”

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