A user story is a small, self-contained unit of development work designed to accomplish a specific goal within a product. A user story is usually written from the user’s perspective and follows the format: “As [a user persona], I want [to perform this action] so that [I can accomplish this goal].”

In agile software development, a user story is a brief, plain-language explanation of a feature or functionality written from a user’s point of view. Many agile experts also describe a user story as the smallest unit of product development work that can lead to a complete element of user functionality.

User stories:

• Are easy for anyone to understand
• Represent bite-sized deliverables that can fit in sprints, whereas not all full features can.
• Help the team focus on real people, rather than abstract features
• Build momentum by giving development teams a feeling of progress

Most product teams use a similar user story template, typically just a sentence or two written according to the following formula:

As a [description of user], I want [functionality] so that [benefit].

In practice, user stories might look like these:

• As a database administrator, I want to automatically merge datasets from different sources so that I can more easily create reports for my internal customers.
• As a brand manager, I want to get alerts whenever a reseller advertises our products below agreed-upon prices so that I can quickly take action to protect our brand.
• As the leader of a remote team, I want our team-messaging app to include file sharing and annotation so that my team can collaborate in real-time and keep an archive of their work in a single place.

User Story vs. Use Case: What’s the Difference?

Like user stories, a use case describes how a user might interact with a product to solve a specific problem. But the two are not interchangeable; they are different tools used in product development.