epics — the epic kickoff
The Epic kickoff
Before any shaping work begins, the trio sits together for two to four hours per Epic. This session is the most valuable investment in the Epic's life. Everything ambiguous here costs ten times as much to resolve after wireframes exist and twenty times as much after code is written.
What the session produces is not a task list. It produces shared situational understanding — everyone in the room has the same picture of who Gal is, what her Tuesday afternoon looks like, what done actually means for her. Without that shared picture, three people can work for two weeks and produce three things that don't fit together.
What the kickoff produces
- Re-reading the brief together. Twenty minutes. The Experience Snapshot, the journey, the Decisions, the Prediction — out loud, with whoever has the strongest memory of the observation walking the others through it.
- The Epic name. A verb and an activity — tested against the journey: does this name describe the broken column we are addressing? The person from the brief is named in the Epic description, not in the title.
- The Epic description in JIRA. A narrative paragraph grounding the activity in the observed problem. Not a feature list — the story of why this Epic exists, written for a developer reading it six weeks from now who needs to remember why the work matters.
- What done means for this Epic. Three to five observable conditions specific to the activity. "All 28 students have grades in the school system within one session." "The operator does not run manual reconciliation after billing cycles." Not release-level prioritisation — the conditions that, when all true, mean this Epic's activity is whole.
- Story backbones. One sentence per scene within the activity. "Gal sees all submission results." "Gal marks an open-answer response." JIRA cards under the Epic. No scenarios, no wireframes. The activity broken into named scenes.
- First-day blockers. Things that, if not resolved before mapping, will stop the work. Named, owned, given a date.