What is an Epic?

John Spacey, updated on December 24, 2022

An epic is a user story that is too big to be implemented directly. Instead it serves as a campaign that may include hundreds of user stories spread over many sprints. Epic is a broad and flexible term with little concrete meaning that nonetheless is a useful concept that teams may adopt to unify stories under a big goal.

As an example consider the broad user story, "As a salesperson, I would like competitive intelligence, so that I can be more prepared for sales presentations." This isn't implementable because it's a little too broad. Specifically, the term competitive intelligence can mean information about products, prices, features and capabilities of competitors that might come from a large number of sources. As such, this story might be considered an epic. Any user stories in the backlog that relate to competitive intelligence can then be considered part of the epic. For example, a story such as "As a salesperson, I want to see the top ten sellers in every product category, so that I can research the competition" is implementable as part of an competitive intelligence epic.

Overview: Epics
Type	Scrum
Definition	A big story that unifies a number of user stories.
Value	Gives a broad business context to user stories so that everyone knows what you're trying to achieve.
Related Concepts	User Stories Scrum