After months of research and creating detailed personas, we hit a wall that we probably should have seen coming. We had all this great information about what users needed, but when we tried to turn it into a list of features for our developers, everything felt disconnected and overwhelming.

Our first attempt was basically just brainstorming features based on what we'd learned, but we ended up with a random collection of ideas with no clear way to prioritize them. We needed a better system, so we borrowed an approach that breaks big user needs into smaller, manageable pieces. We called the big needs "EPICs" and the smaller pieces "child stories."

We organized a two-day workshop with everyone who had a stake in what we built—product people, designers, developers, and marketing. The goal was to take everything we'd learned about our users and turn it into clear development priorities.

We went through each persona and asked three simple questions: What do they really want to accomplish? What's stopping them right now? And what would make the biggest difference in their experience? This generated way more ideas than we could handle, so we used dot-voting to narrow things down.

Instead of describing features like "build a payment system," we framed everything from the user's perspective: "As Sarah, I want to understand exactly what data is being collected so that I feel comfortable using the platform."