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User Stories for Communications Managers
By: Laurie Mitchell, Tegrit
When your organization is tweaking an existing pension administration system, conducting a significant upgrade, or buying new, that is your opportunity to elevate your communication tools. Modern advice is to avoid solution-specific requirements and instead express a requirement as a need in a user story. This article focuses on the kinds of user stories communications managers need most.
This is an excerpt from NCPERS Winter 2025 issue of PERSist.When your organization is tweaking an existing pension administration system, conducting a significant upgrade, or buying new, that is your opportunity to elevate your communication tools. Modern advice is to avoid solution-specific requirements and instead express a requirement as a need in a user story. This article focuses on the kinds of user stories communications managers need most.
When your organization is tweaking an existing pension administration system (PAS), conducting a significant upgrade or buying new, that is your opportunity to elevate your communication tools. Seize the moment to participate in writing requirements to promote the importance of communications and ensure that the tools you need for your daily work are included in the PAS changes.
Modern advice is to avoid solution-specific requirements and instead express a requirement as a need in a user story. User stories have become popular for requirements because:
- They are written from the perspective of a person (role) who will use or be impacted by the feature.
- They provide meaningful context for why the person needs the requirement.
- They help define high-level requirements without diving into low-level detail too early.
Perhaps most importantly, by not tying the requirement to a solution, your developers will have more flexibility in finding a creative and optimal solution.
User stories typically follow this format.
| Who…. | …wants What… | …. because Why |
For background on writing user stories, see the additional resources linked below. This article focuses on the kinds of user stories communications managers need most. When writing your stories, consider the tools that you use every day to manage messages to your customers. For each of these, you are the WHO asking for WHAT you want BECAUSE YOU NEED effective, timely, professional communication deliverables. Here are some ideas for you to use when you are ready to make changes to your pension administration system.
As a communications manager…
I want to use both email and print to deliver marketing messages to targeted groups of customers
so I can educate our members on their pension system opportunities and inform them of issues with their accounts.
I want my communications team to create and maintain the member-facing emails and letters in the system
so that timely changes can be made without the assistance of a developer.
I want automatic, real-time affirmations delivered by email to the member for each transaction completed in the member portal
so that the member knows the transaction is done and internal users do not have to create the correspondence.
I want multiple options for fonts, styles and paragraphing available when creating emails/letters in the system
so that those materials represent the pension system professionally.
I want outbound printed letters/forms to be batched and delivered for centralized printing
so that internal users are not printing/folding/stuffing mail.
I want to generate a list of all system emails/letters (with their tracking numbers) and the workflows each letter is generated from
so I can audit the communications and schedule them for review.
I want to send broadcast email messages to all employers at one time
so we can keep employers informed of upcoming due dates, reports, system events or other plan activities.
Hopefully these examples will help you craft user stories that will get you and your team the tools you need to build and maintain your member-facing messages.
For more reading on writing user stories, try these resources:
https://tech.gsa.gov/guides/effective_user_stories/
https://www.atlassian.com/agile/project-management/user-stories
Bio: Laurie Mitchell has worked in the pension industry since 2003 when she joined the Michigan Office of Retirement Services. There she served in many roles, including leading portions of their pension replacement project, and served eight years as their Customer Service Director. After retiring, she joined Tegrit where she serves as a Senior Business Consultant focusing on marketing and RFP management.
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