The typical user story template is of the form:  As X, I want to do Y so that Z.  X is the user’s role, Y is the functionality the user wants, and Z is the benefit. 

A reason given for using the first-person pronoun, “I”, is that the “person’s mind goes instantly to imagining he or she is a such-and-such.”  This is presumably about empathy, a critical skill needed for building impactful products.

But, is the “I” critical in the user story template? No, it’s not; it may even be counterproductive. 

The user story can be written as: X wants to do Y so that Z. This has three benefits. 

1. User first

The user is literally the first in the sentence. Starting with “I” may result in an empathy trap, the inability to “strike a balance between emotion and thought and between self and other.” This can distort reasoning about the best product to build to drive customer outcomes and business outcomes. Secondly, there are other research-backed methods to cultivate empathy. And finally, in the era of personalized products, the user should be viewed not only as the HR manager, but also as Jamie, Jesse, or Jordan. 

2. Entities in SaaS

In modern SaaS products, there are multiple entities – e.g. customers, partners, competitors, suppliers, regulators – and their incentives to consider. “The regulators want Y so that Z” is a lot more readable. 

3. Crisp

The “X wants …” form is about 20% less wordy than the “As X …” form. Here’s an example from Wikipedia: As the HR manager, I want to create a screening quiz so that I can understand whether I want to send possible recruits to the functional manager. (27 words)

And the alternative: The HR manager wants to create a screening quiz to understand whether to send possible recruits to the functional manager. (20 words)

Try it: X wants to do Y so that Z. The authors of books on Agile show similar user stories “as a more generic example of writing user stories.”  

PS: Check out more articles on building products. I write to pay it forward and to clarify my thinking.