We’ve had lots of contacts over the last few weeks from a wide cross section of businesses. From Bluetooth Low Energy appliances to Near Field Communication in transport to consumer health care to autonomous vehicles to health research data.
One things transcends all, the questions:

What are you trying to achieve?
What is the product you are trying to build?

This question often leads to more questions, fanning out into many goals and features. Often rapidly reaching unforeseen levels of complexity.

One of the best tools for this process is the user story. A user story is basically fill-in-the-gaps time:

As a ___, I want to _____ so that _____

Anyone can generate these user stories, but the product owner will lead the process. It’s good to get the development team to have a long session at the start of the project, generating and elaborating user stories in order to create their task backlog.

If we back up a little, a thorough examination of the higher level goals of the project is a great place to start before jumping into user stories. We ask:

What are the goals of building this web app / mobile app / bespoke software ?

Cue much deep thought.