This is an excerpt from my upcoming book 50 Quick Ideas to Improve your User Stories. If you want to try this idea in practice, I’m participating in the Product Owner Survival Camp in Zurich in March and we’ll be playing around with hierarchical backlogs and behaviour changes then as well.

Bill Wake’s INVEST set of user story characteristics has two conflicting forces. Independent and Valuable are often difficult to reconcile with Small. Value of software is a vague and esoteric concept in the domain of business users, but task size is under the control of a delivery team, so many teams end up choosing size over value. The result are “technical stories”, things that don’t really produce any outcome and a disconnect between what the team is pushing out and what the business sponsors really care about.

Many delivery teams also implicitly assume that something has value just because...