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It was time to start developing version 2 of Initech’s flagship software product. This meant planning meetings. So many meetings to plan.

The most important, for the actual development team, was the user story meeting. At the heart of these meetings were several people from the program team, incl Stevethe director of architecture, Brian, and a number of product owners, responsible for different segments of the overall product.

As a group, they would review user stories and approve them. Once they are approved for development, work would begin.

Meetings were difficult to schedule, due to the number of stakeholders, and were seen as a checkpoint – you can’t start implementing features until the product owner has gone through the user story with the team, but they were also a priority.

At the meeting, Product Owner Renee started introducing the team to some of the features it has. “So this is my user, Fred Flinstone.” On the slide, an image of an animated character popped up next to a series of dots describing the feature. “He needs to add the item to inventory, so it can be sold. To do that…”

Renee walked them through the details of the feature. Heads were nodding around the table – it was a pretty simple CRUD application. It was good that the product owner walked them through a few workflow things unique to Initech’s product, but it wasn’t anything particularly shocking.

Renee moved on to the next slide. “And now, Fred has to run a report. This report has to . . .”

Again, Renee walked them through the key fields that should be in the report, how the report is run, what would be reasonable filtering options.

“Any questions?”

Brian, the director, looked thoughtful for a moment, then said, “I think I know. I don’t really see why one person would want to add items to inventory—the receiving job—and run spending inventory reports. There’s no reason that someone who does that task should also run a report. I can’t accept your user stories until you change one of the users to a different persona.”

“What? The name doesn’t matter,” Renee protested.

“We should probably just stick a pin in this and pick up when we can reschedule another meeting. Thanks everyone,” Brian said. He grabbed his laptop, got up and left the meeting. They all sat for a moment, realized that the meeting was actually over, and followed him out a few minutes later.

That afternoon, Steve was finally able to find Brian. “What was that?”

Brian sighed. “Look, the whole development team is swamped, you know that. We don’t have the bandwidth for new work. Tracey should have that priority bug fixed in a few days, and maybe when that’s done, we can start putting resources on the version 2 project. For now, we have to stall and that’s the only thing I could think of.”