Maybe some of the premises of what I’m about to say don’t apply because we’re supposed to create user stories with the customer, but my reallity is that most of the time I only have a few hours to talk to someone, hear them focusing on their pain points, learn a bit about their business and off I go\u2026 starting to translate what the user said to what might be a software product that solves their needs.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
And so I’m at the hands of the person that talked to me\u2026 did she focus on everything that was needed, did she talk about stuff that I had never heard of, did she remember to say everything that she wanted to? And of course, my previous knowledge about the company, or industry, will help me make more or less informed questions.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
I get back to the office and I have to start thinking in everything that was told, plus trying to imagine what should have been said but probably it was so obvious to the customer that he didn’t even think it was something worth to be mentioned, because\u2026 of course the system already does that\u2026 right?
So, yeah, I don\u2019t write the user story while talking to the customer because I don\u2019t have the time to do that. But I do have to come up with user stories to organize what the user wants and at the very least validate if I’m missing something.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Since all I have is as 1h to 2h interview with the customer\/user, I needed a way to visualize everything, put all the pieces together, understand the flow of information, what happens, when, by whom\u2026 in essence I need to write a story about the business, how does it start, what influences it, who are the participants. And since I said I wanted to visualize it, why not think of it has if it were a movie\u2026 with a stage, actors, a plot.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Of course, I’m no screenplay writer, but I do have a tool that likes to write and write and write\u2026 the LLM \ud83d\ude42 and so I ask Claude to look at the transcript and help me identify the main processes that the client talks about.
Then I ask it to create the script for the different scenes of that process. And, importantly, I let it make up stuff, based on the knowledge that it has about similar processses. This allows me to uncover potential needs that the client didn’t mentioned.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
With all this scripts in place I can more clearly see if we’re going too deep in some aspect of the system (I just want to save a date not have the log of all changes that happened during the lifecycle of a process), or if something is missing.
With some added benefits\u2026 Talking to a client and telling them a story about their business, using their terminology, tends to be, in my experience, more productive that showing them a list of user stories\u2026<\/p>\n\n\n\n
But what I think is even better than that is that, when we’re already implementing this user stories, the developers don’t have to imagine what the user story stands for\u2026 they can “see it” in action in the script, it gives them context, which allows them to more easily empathize with customer and even uncover new scenarios or at least understand whats important vs accessory.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
(I sure would like to transform this into a comic or a video\u2026 but I haven’t found the tool (or time) to do this)<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Limited time with customers? I ask Claude to turn interview transcripts into screenplay scripts\u2014with scenes and actors. Helps uncover what wasn’t said. Devs can ‘see’ the story, not just read tickets.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":26144,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-26108","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-sem-categoria"],"yoast_head":"\n