Why I Prefer Stakeholder Stories

The Challenge of Hidden Context

Picture this: You’re in a product planning meeting, and someone reads out a user story: “As a user, I want to receive email notifications so that I stay informed about updates.”

Everyone nods. It sounds reasonable. But here’s the problem—who actually wants this feature, and why?

Dig deeper and you’ll discover the real story. Maybe it’s the Customer Success team trying to reduce support tickets, or Marketing pushing for higher engagement metrics. The “user” in the story? They’re often just a convenient fiction masking the real motivation.

This is the fundamental challenge with user stories: they obscure the very context teams need to make good decisions. When business value stays hidden and real stakeholders remain unnamed, we lose the strategic clarity needed for smart prioritization. Teams end up building features instead of solving the right problems.

Enter Stakeholder Stories

So how do we fix this? The answer lies in flipping the script entirely.

As an IT architect, I’ve seen firsthand what happens when you don’t understand the real wants and needs behind any request. Teams typically start with surface-level feature requests—“we need a dashboard,” “users want notifications,” “add a search function”—without digging into the underlying drivers.

The consequences are predictable and expensive: solutions that technically work but don’t solve the actual problem, endless scope creep as stakeholders realize their real needs weren’t captured, and technical architectures that optimize for the wrong outcomes. I’ve watched teams build perfectly functional systems that nobody uses because they solved the stated problem instead of the real problem.

The highest level of requirements—the ones that drive everything else—must capture the true needs of all stakeholders, including users, not just surface-level feature requests. This is where stakeholder stories become transformative.

I first discovered this approach through Liz Keogh’s post “They’re Not User Stories”, and it fundamentally changed how I think about requirements. When stakeholder stories get this foundation right, everything downstream becomes clearer: technical architecture decisions, integration patterns, and system boundaries all align naturally with real stakeholder needs and wants.

The key insight is simple but powerful: Instead of asking “What does the user want?”, stakeholder stories ask “What outcome are we trying to achieve, and which stakeholders actually care about it?”

The format flips the traditional user story structure:

Traditional User Story:
As [a user/role]
I want [some functionality]
So that [some benefit]

Stakeholder Story:
In order to 🎯 [the outcome to be achieved]
As 🧑‍💼 [the stakeholder role or persona]
I want 🧩 [the specific requirement or capability needed]

Quick Example:

User Story:
As a user
I want to see personalized product recommendations
So that I can discover relevant items

Stakeholder Story:
In order to increase average order value
As David, VP of Sales
I want users to see algorithmically-generated upsell recommendations based on their browsing history

Why This Works Better

This isn’t just rearranging words—it’s rewiring how you think. Starting with “In order to” forces you to think about the outcome before you think about the feature. You have to answer “What are we trying to accomplish?” before you can even ask “What should we build?”

Think of it like meal planning: you decide “We’re making Italian tonight” before writing “buy tomatoes” on the shopping list. Purpose drives the ingredients.

When outcomes lead the conversation, everything else—the stakeholder, the capability, the implementation—gets evaluated against that outcome. Features become tools for achieving goals, not goals themselves.

After working with numerous product teams, I’ve seen this shift create four immediate changes:

Vague justifications disappear. “Better user experience” transforms into measurable targets with clear success criteria.

Real decision-makers emerge. When you name the stakeholder, you clarify who owns the decision and will judge success.

Complex stakeholder ecosystems become visible. Modern products serve compliance officers, customer success managers, and business development teams—not just generic “users.”

Prioritization becomes strategic. Instead of choosing which features feel shiny, you’re making conscious choices about which outcomes matter most right now.

Integration with Other Techniques

Stakeholder stories aren’t meant to replace all of your existing practices—they enhance them by providing clearer stakeholder context. Here’s how they work with other common techniques:

Objectives and Key Results (OKRs): The “In order to” clause should directly connect to your OKRs. If a stakeholder story can’t be traced back to a key result, question whether it’s worth building.

For example, our “increase average order value” stakeholder story might connect to a company OKR like “Grow revenue per customer by 30% this year.”

Acceptance Criteria: Use acceptance criteria to define the specific conditions that must be met for the stakeholder story to be considered complete. The stakeholder story provides the “why,” acceptance criteria define the “what.”

For example, our earlier stakeholder story might have acceptance criteria like: “Increase average order value by 25% by Q4 while keeping conversion rate ≥ 3.2%”

Gherkin Scenarios: Gherkin’s Given-When-Then format works perfectly with stakeholder stories. The stakeholder story sets the business context, while Gherkin scenarios specify the exact behaviors and edge cases.

For example: “Given a customer has items in their cart, When they view the cart page, Then they should see 3 relevant upsell recommendations And see the recommendations within 2 seconds.”

Product Roadmaps: Stakeholder stories help you organize your roadmap around outcomes rather than features. Group related stories by stakeholder or objective to see natural release boundaries.

For example, you might group all stories related to “reduce customer support burden” or organize by stakeholder like “VP of Sales initiatives” to create coherent releases.

User Journey Mapping: When mapping user journeys, stakeholder stories help you identify whose goals each touchpoint serves, making it easier to prioritize improvements that matter most.

For example, a checkout flow might serve the user’s goal of “complete purchase quickly” and the CFO’s goal of “reduce payment processing costs.”

The beauty is that stakeholder stories make all these other techniques more effective by ensuring they’re grounded in real stakeholder value rather than assumptions about what users might want.

Making the Switch

You don’t need to overhaul everything at once or rewrite your entire backlog. Instead, try stakeholder stories in two situations:

For new requests: When the next feature request comes in, write it as a stakeholder story from the start. Ask “Who is the real stakeholder here? What outcome are they trying to achieve?”

For unclear stories: If you have user stories that feel vague or hard to prioritize, rewrite them using the stakeholder format. Often the lack of clarity comes from missing stakeholder context.

As you apply this approach, notice how it changes your planning conversations.

You’ll know it’s working when your team starts comparing concrete outcomes instead of debating which user need “feels” more important.

The Strategic Impact

This isn’t just about story format—it’s about fundamentally changing how product teams think about their work.

When you consistently start with outcomes, something powerful happens: you develop stakeholder empathy—the ability to see your product through the eyes of people who have real consequences riding on its success. Teams stop building features in isolation and start solving actual problems.

Most importantly, stakeholder stories transform teams from feature factories into outcome-driven partners. Instead of just building what’s requested, teams start asking the right question: “Will this actually achieve what the stakeholder needs?”

This shift—from shipping features to delivering outcomes—is what separates high-performing product teams from the rest.