Managing large and intricate projects can be a challenge. You might find yourself juggling numerous tasks and trying to align everything with your company's overall strategy. Agile epics provide a practical approach to breaking down this complexity into manageable pieces, enabling your teams to stay organized and focused on delivering value to your customers.
In this guide:
What is an Agile epic?
An Agile epic is a large chunk of work that needs to be divided into smaller, more actionable items called user stories. These user stories are typically based on what your customers or end-users need, ensuring your project directly addresses their requirements. A key characteristic of an epic is its size. It's usually too big to be completed within a single Agile sprint, which is a short, focused work cycle. Therefore, you'll break down the epic into several smaller stories that can be tackled step by step over multiple sprints.
Think of an Agile epic as providing a high-level view of your project, keeping the focus on the main strategic goal and the value it will deliver. While user stories detail specific features and functionalities, epics ensure your team remains oriented toward the larger objectives. Notably, the scope of an Agile epic can adapt as your project progresses and you gain more insights and feedback from stakeholders and customers. This flexibility is a core principle of Agile, allowing you to adjust your course based on real-world learning.
How epics fit into the Agile framework.
In an Agile framework, the project roadmap sits at the top of the hierarchical structure. Each roadmap may include a series of clearly defined individual goals or milestones that are visualized as a set of initiatives plotted along a timeline. Initiatives can consist of one or more epics. These epics are then broken down into smaller, even more manageable tasks called user stories.
To summarize, here are the definitions of the various hierarchal pieces involved in the Agile framework:
- Theme — The project roadmap or overarching project goal
- Initiative — A group of epics
- Epic — A high-level user story
- User story — A single task within an epic
- Sprint — A one-to-two-week period in which one or more user stories are completed
In Agile, an epic is part of a project's hierarchical organization, breaking down a larger deliverable into smaller chunks, known as stories or issues. You can also think of these "stories' as tasks to be completed during a one- to two-week sprint. Because an epic comprises multiple user stories, it typically takes several sprints to complete all user stories. However, time frames can vary by team and project, and shorter epics may be completed within one or two sprints.
At the end of each sprint, the team gathers feedback on the user stories completed from stakeholders, executives, and clients. For example, if you launch a new product feature but get customer feedback that the feature is not intuitive, you’ll need to rework the feature based on this feedback. This process enhances flexibility throughout the project, enables adjustments to keep pace with market trends, and yields a continuous cycle of improvement for the overall project roadmap.
How to create Agile epics.
Agile epics should align directly with strategic initiatives or high-priority goals, bridging broad objectives and actionable user stories. For example, suppose your team’s roadmap includes launching a new search feature for your ecommerce site. The related epic should support that goal by focusing on user-facing outcomes, such as improving product discoverability or reducing search time.
Start by reviewing your team’s quarterly or annual objectives. Identify the key problems you need to solve, particularly those that significantly impact customers or stakeholders. Then, shape your epics around these challenges, each representing a clear, customer-centered goal that can be delivered in increments.
Best practices for writing and managing your Agile epics.
To get the most out of Agile epics, consider these best practices:
- Define clear objectives: Each epic should have a clear and concise objective that aligns with your broader business goals and delivers tangible value to your customers.
- Establish acceptance criteria: Define clear criteria for when the epic is complete and successful.
- Break down into user stories: Divide each epic into smaller, more manageable user stories that can typically be completed within a single sprint.
- Prioritize effectively: Use methods to prioritize your epics based on business value and urgency, ensuring you work on the most important items first.
- Estimate effort: Although epics span multiple sprints, estimate the overall time and effort required to facilitate planning and resource allocation.
- Visualize progress: Use tools like burndown charts or Kanban boards to track the progress of your epics and maintain transparency within your team.
- Gather feedback: Continuously collect feedback from stakeholders and incorporate it into your epics to ensure the outcome meets expectations.
- Regularly review and refine: Review the status of your epics regularly and refine them based on progress, new insights, and evolving requirements.
Examples of Agile epics.
Here are a couple of examples to help you better visualize what epics look like in practice.
1. Launch a major marketing campaign to boost SaaS subscriptions by 25%.
A marketing team is launching a major campaign to boost SaaS subscriptions and help their organization. The marketing plan will target new and current customer bases, involve multiple channels and assets, and have an overall budget of $1 million. This will not only be a large, multi-month project but also require a clear plan of who will accomplish what and when. To achieve the highest ROI from the project, working in an Agile fashion will enable the team to incorporate feedback throughout and adjust tactics or channels as necessary.
Epics:
- Plan the marketing campaign.
- Deliver the campaign.
- Measure results.
From here, each epic is broken down into user stories.
User stories for epic #1:
- Identify target audience, channels, and types of assets.
- Determine the campaign timeline.
- Set KPIs for the campaign.
Once all the user stories have been completed, you can move on to the next epic, which, in this example, would be the campaign delivery. You can also continue gathering feedback from product stakeholders on the first epic — such as if they feel you are targeting the right customer audiences and channels. Based on feedback, you may need to adjust your campaign plan before implementing it.
2. Adding a search feature to an ecommerce site.
To enhance the customer experience, a web development team and a product team are planning to integrate a search feature into their business’s ecommerce site. This will make it easier for customers to quickly find products they’re interested in. Part of the project's complexity is ensuring that all products are included in the search database and tagged in multiple search formats to deliver the closest match to the intended search to the customer.
Epics:
- Map the schema for search.
- Implement search on the front end.
- Add advanced search features.
With these three epics defined, the next step is determining each epic's user stories.
User stories for epic #1:
- Create a database file of products.
- Upload the database file to search wizard.
- Build product index.
Measuring Agile epics.
It is essential to measure project progress carefully to keep projects on time, manage resources effectively, and identify bottlenecks before they occur. Reports such as burndown charts, velocity charts, and cumulative flow diagrams allow you to measure the progress of your epics. These reports are easy to create and customize with the right Agile project management tool:
- Burndown chart. A simple chart that tracks a team’s work progress against the time remaining to complete the work.
- Velocity chart. This chart compares the work committed to the work completed to show how quickly your team delivers on the project.
- Cumulative flow diagram. This diagram visualizes the entire workflow, helping to identify problems or bottlenecks and reduce your average cycle time. It also enables better management of your work-in-progress limits and increases your team’s throughput.
Source: Adobe, “Burndown Chart.”
In addition to having the correct reports to evaluate the progress of your epics, other reporting and dashboard features can further increase visibility and transparency across all project teams and stakeholders. When looking for the right Agile project management tool, consider the following features:
- Real-time data always gives complete visibility into the progress of your epics.
- Customized reporting and dashboards make creating reports and project views easy according to how your organization or project managers manage Agile projects.
- Automation enables you to deliver reports automatically to various stakeholders, ensuring that the right teams or team members always have the most up-to-date information.
- Alignment between stories and strategic goals provides a clearer view of the big picture, enabling executives to make data-driven decisions and project managers to resolve bottlenecks before they occur.
Why use Agile epics?
Adopting Agile epics can bring several advantages to your project management, especially when dealing with complex initiatives:
- Improved organization. By grouping related user stories under a common epic, you can create a clear hierarchy and make large projects more straightforward to understand and manage. This structured approach enables you to break down work into smaller, deliverable pieces, allowing you to provide value to customers continuously rather than waiting for a massive project to be completed.
- Enhanced agility. Epics allow your teams to break down their work without losing sight of the main objective. This provides the flexibility to adapt to changes and incorporate feedback on smaller increments while contributing to the overall strategic vision.
- Customer alignment. Epics ensure your development efforts stay focused on your customers' needs by serving as containers for user stories that directly address those requirements.
- Better team collaboration. Completing an epic often requires multiple teams to work together towards a shared goal, fostering better teamwork and communication across your organization.
- More practical time management. You can improve your project timelines by breaking down large epics into smaller, sprint-sized user stories. This granular approach makes estimating the effort needed and tracking progress easier.
- Clearer progress visibility. Epics provide a high-level view of project progress, enabling managers and executives to stay informed about the status of key projects.
- Reduced scope creep. Clear definitions of epics and their breakdown into user stories can help you better manage the project's scope, potentially reducing the risk of the project expanding beyond its initial boundaries.
Managing Agile epics with Adobe Workfront.
Adobe Workfront offers a comprehensive platform for efficiently managing Agile epics and streamlining Agile processes. Workfront allows you to create and manage Agile teams, supporting Scrum and Kanban methodologies. You can manage your product backlog within Workfront, organizing and prioritizing epics and their associated user stories.
For Scrum teams, Workfront facilitates sprint planning, allowing you to easily assign user stories from epics to specific sprints. Kanban teams can utilize Workfront's Kanban boards to visualize the workflow related to epics and track progress through customizable stages.
Furthermore, Adobe Workfront integrates with other Adobe products and various external applications, enhancing collaboration and streamlining workflows. By providing a central platform, Adobe Workfront helps improve visibility, enhance collaboration, and better track progress towards your strategic goals.
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