Implicitly or explicitly, product-development teams in digital spaces will go through a process of gathering and employing data to help them create and iterate upon a user experience that invites high engagement. An important part of gathering this data is having actual users test the product, but in order to learn what testable criteria constitute successful user behaviors, managers and teams can employ user stories, testable micronarratives about user experience. User stories give managers and teams important tools they can use to focus their observations, bring actionable ideas, and facilitate productive work on development-ready designs. In particular, they can give general managers a focal point for their work on continuous design and a way to prioritize with purpose as they decide on a backlog for development, iteration to iteration. This technical note takes readers on a deep dive into user stories as they apply to continuous design, prototyping, usability testing, and analytics. It explores how managers and teams can create, refine, and prioritize them to help create the best possible user experience within the products they are designing.

This technical note introduces readers to two important concepts involving design in the digital sphere: continuous design and hypothesis-driven design (HDD). Continuous design applies the proposition that rather than doing a large amount of design and research up front, a team is better off building smaller, specific items, testing them with users, and iteratively changing the design based on what it learns. HDD operates from the foundation that ideas should be testable and teams should work to minimize waste through small batch sizes and relevant evidence. HDD can help teams design better by helping them find the right problem and the right solution through two hypotheses: the persona hypothesis and the jobs-to-be-done (JTBD) hypothesis. Using these, teams ask, ""Who is this for and what existing job (or problem, habit, or desire) does it deliver on?"" Touching on Lean Startup, agile, and other influential bodies of work, this note walks readers through asking the right questions; designing experiments to test persona, demand, JTBD, and usability hypotheses; and creating user-focused stories. It is a helpful tool for any team that's innovating and wants to make astute decisions about where and how to invest its time and energy.

This tech note is designed to introduce general management students to the body of work associated with agile and its current state of practice. While anchored in a simple 68-word manifesto, agile now offers guidance on applied practice across ideation, design, development, and deployment of working products. This note describes how teams use agile to focus their work and apply current practice across disciplines like design thinking, Lean Startup, and DevOps.