Key Takeaways

• Epics are large bodies of work that capture high-level initiatives, while user stories describe specific user needs, and tasks represent the concrete work items needed to complete a user story.
• The proper hierarchy (Epic → User Story → Task) creates a clear framework that makes complex projects manageable through progressive decomposition.
• User stories follow the “As a [role], I want [feature], so that [benefit]” format to ensure the team understands the value behind each feature.
• Tasks should be small enough to be completed within a day or two by a single team member, making them the most granular level of work tracking.
• Atlassian’s Jira software provides specialized tools to organize and link these elements together, making it easier to track progress up and down the hierarchy.

The Hierarchy That Drives Agile Projects Forward

In the world of agile project management, understanding the difference between epics, user stories, and tasks isn’t just semantic nitpicking – it’s fundamental to successfully organizing work. These three elements form a natural hierarchy that helps teams break down complex projects into manageable pieces. Think of it as a Russian nesting doll: the epic contains multiple user stories, and each user story contains multiple tasks. When implemented correctly, this structure creates clarity, improves estimation accuracy, and helps teams deliver value incrementally.

Many agile teams struggle with these concepts because they seem abstract at first. But mastering this hierarchy is often the difference between chaotic sprints and smooth delivery. The key is understanding not just what each element is, but how they relate to each other and serve different purposes in your agile workflow.

The Problem of Confused Terminology

Walk into ten different agile teams, and you’ll likely hear ten slightly different definitions of epics, stories, and tasks. This inconsistency creates confusion, especially for teams transitioning to agile or bringing on new team members. Some organizations use “feature” instead of “epic,” while others might call user stories “requirements.” These semantic differences can lead to misaligned expectations and communication breakdowns.

To make matters more complicated, different tools implement these concepts differently. Jira’s definition of an epic isn’t exactly the same as Azure DevOps’ definition, which differs from what you might read in a Scrum guide. By establishing clear, consistent terminology within your team, you create a shared language that reduces misunderstandings and improves collaboration.

How These Elements Work Together

Think of epics, user stories, and tasks as different levels of magnification on the same project. The epic gives you the big picture – a high-level initiative like “Implement User Authentication System.” User stories zoom in one level to show specific user needs: “As a returning customer, I want to log in with my email so I can access my previous orders.” Tasks zoom in even further to the actual work items: “Create database schema for user credentials” or “Design login form UI.”

This progressive decomposition serves several critical purposes. It allows product owners and stakeholders to think at the strategic level with epics, while giving developers the tactical details they need through tasks. It also enables better estimation – while an epic might be too large to estimate accurately, the component user stories and tasks become much more predictable.

Pro Tip: Think of the relationship between these elements as a sentence: “To complete this Epic, we need to deliver these User Stories, which require completing these specific Tasks.” This mental model helps maintain the proper hierarchy in your planning.

The beauty of this structure is its flexibility. An epic might span multiple sprints or even releases, while the contained user stories can be independently prioritized and scheduled. This allows teams to deliver incremental value while working toward larger objectives. The hierarchy also makes it easier to track progress – completion of tasks rolls up to completion of user stories, which rolls up to progress on the epic.

What Exactly Is an Epic?

An epic represents a large body of work that delivers significant value but is too big to complete in a single sprint. It’s a high-level container that groups related user stories together under a common objective. Epics typically address major features, significant improvements, or large components of your product. They’re the “big rocks” in your product roadmap that might take weeks or months to complete. For more insights, explore the differences between epics, stories, and tasks.

The Large-Scale Initiative

Epics capture initiatives that are too complex to describe in a single user story. While a user story focuses on one specific piece of functionality from a user’s perspective, an epic encompasses a broader scope that requires multiple user stories to implement. For example, “Shopping Cart Functionality” would be an epic, not a user story, because it involves numerous interactions, interfaces, and backend processes.

What makes epics valuable is their ability to connect tactical work to strategic objectives. They provide context for why certain user stories matter and how they fit into the bigger picture. This helps teams understand the purpose behind their work and make better decisions about implementation details. Epics also serve as convenient containers for reporting progress to stakeholders who care more about major features than individual stories.

When to Create an Epic

Knowing when to create an epic versus a user story is crucial for maintaining the right level of granularity in your backlog. Create an epic when you identify work that’s too large for a single sprint, involves multiple team members or disciplines, and delivers a significant feature or capability. If explaining the work takes more than a few sentences or naturally breaks into multiple distinct pieces of functionality, you’re likely dealing with an epic.

You should also consider creating an epic when you need to track a large initiative over time but don’t yet have all the details fleshed out. This allows product owners to capture the high-level vision while progressively elaborating on the specifics as the team learns more. Epics often emerge during roadmap planning or quarterly goal-setting sessions, whereas user stories typically get defined closer to implementation time.

Epic Examples Across Different Industries

Epics take different forms depending on your industry and product type. In e-commerce, an epic might be “Customer Checkout Process” or “Product Recommendation Engine.” For healthcare software, examples include “Patient Registration Workflow” or “Medical Records Integration.” In financial services, you might see epics like “Fraud Detection System” or “Investment Portfolio Dashboard.”

What all these examples have in common is their scope – they represent substantial functionality that delivers clear business value but requires multiple user stories to implement completely. They’re also expressed in business language that stakeholders can understand, not technical jargon that only developers would recognize.

User Stories Explained Simply

User stories sit in the middle of our hierarchy, bridging the gap between high-level epics and concrete tasks. A user story describes a single piece of functionality from the user’s perspective, focusing on the who, what, and why of a feature rather than the how. They’re intentionally brief, typically fitting on an index card or small ticket in your project management tool.

The “As a… I want… So that…” Formula

The classic user story format follows a simple template: “As a [type of user], I want [some functionality] so that [benefit/value].” This structure ensures the story captures not just what needs to be built, but why it matters and who it’s for. For example: “As a mobile user, I want to save my payment information so that I can check out faster next time.”

This format keeps the focus on user value rather than implementation details. It helps prevent the common mistake of building features nobody wants by forcing the team to articulate the benefit upfront. It also facilitates conversation – a good user story isn’t a comprehensive specification but rather a promise for a conversation about user needs.

Acceptance Criteria: Making Stories Complete

A well-formed user story always includes acceptance criteria – the conditions that must be met for the story to be considered complete. These criteria eliminate ambiguity and set clear expectations for what “done” looks like. They typically take the form of scenarios: “Given [some context], when [an action occurs], then [this outcome happens].”

Good acceptance criteria cover both the happy path and edge cases. They specify behavior, not implementation, leaving room for the development team to determine the best technical approach. For example, acceptance criteria for a login story might include “Given valid credentials, when the user clicks login, then they are redirected to their dashboard” and “Given invalid credentials, when the user clicks login, then an appropriate error message is displayed.”

User Story Sizing and Points

Unlike tasks, which are often estimated in hours, user stories are typically sized using story points – a relative measure of effort, complexity, and uncertainty. The Fibonacci sequence (1, 2, 3, 5, 8, 13, 21…) is commonly used for point values, reflecting the increasing uncertainty in larger estimates. This approach acknowledges that precise time estimates become less reliable as complexity increases.

The primary purpose of story points is to help teams gauge how much work they can commit to in a sprint based on their past velocity. If a story exceeds 13 points (or whatever threshold your team sets), it’s usually a sign that it needs to be broken down further. Ideally, most stories in your backlog should be small enough to complete within a few days, making them easier to estimate and less risky to deliver.

Tasks: The Actionable Work Units

Tasks represent the most granular level of work in our hierarchy. They’re the specific, actionable items that team members pick up and complete to deliver a user story. While user stories focus on the what and why, tasks focus on the how – the actual implementation details required to bring a story to life.

How Tasks Break Down User Stories

Breaking a user story into tasks is typically done during sprint planning or refinement sessions. The development team collaboratively identifies all the work needed to complete the story according to its acceptance criteria. This might include coding tasks, testing tasks, design tasks, documentation tasks, and anything else required to meet the definition of done.

A single user story usually generates multiple tasks spanning different disciplines. For example, a story about implementing a new form might include tasks for designing the UI, building the frontend components, creating API endpoints, writing validation logic, and testing the entire flow. Each task should be assigned to a specific team member who has the skills to complete it.

• Design tasks: UI mockups, user flow diagrams, style guide updates
• Development tasks: Frontend implementation, backend services, database changes
• Testing tasks: Unit tests, integration tests, user acceptance testing
• Documentation tasks: API documentation, release notes, knowledge base articles
• DevOps tasks: Configuration changes, deployment scripts, monitoring setup

Task Estimation in Hours

Unlike user stories, which use abstract points, tasks are typically estimated in actual hours. This makes sense because tasks are concrete work items assigned to specific individuals, making time estimation more accurate. A good rule of thumb is that tasks should be small enough to complete in 1-2 days maximum. If a task estimate exceeds 8 hours, it’s often a sign that it needs further breakdown.

Accurate task estimation is crucial for sprint planning and daily standups. When a developer says a task will take 4 hours, the team can reasonably expect it to be completed within a day. This granularity helps identify bottlenecks quickly – if someone reports that a 4-hour task has already consumed 6 hours with little progress, the team knows there’s a problem that needs addressing. Time-based estimates also help teams manage capacity during sprint planning, ensuring no team member is overloaded.

Who Should Create and Assign Tasks?

While product owners typically write user stories and define epics, tasks are best created by the people who will actually do the work. Developers, testers, designers, and other team members have the technical expertise to identify the specific steps needed to implement a feature. This collaborative task breakdown often happens during sprint planning, with the entire team contributing to ensure nothing is missed.

Self-assignment of tasks is a common practice in mature agile teams. Rather than having a project manager distribute work, team members choose tasks based on their skills, availability, and interests. This autonomy increases motivation and ensures tasks are completed by the most appropriate person. It also encourages cross-functional collaboration – when someone finishes their tasks early, they can easily pick up remaining work to help the team meet sprint goals.

The Relationship Between These Three Elements

Understanding how epics, user stories, and tasks relate to each other is crucial for effective agile planning. This hierarchy isn’t just an organizational convenience – it reflects how work naturally breaks down from strategic initiatives to tactical implementation details. The relationship is many-to-many: one epic contains multiple user stories, and one user story generates multiple tasks. This nested structure helps teams maintain traceability from high-level objectives down to daily work.

Epic → User Story → Task Flow

The flow typically starts with defining epics during roadmap or release planning. These large initiatives are then broken down into user stories during backlog refinement, focusing on specific user needs within the larger epic scope. Finally, when user stories are pulled into a sprint, they’re decomposed into concrete tasks during sprint planning. This progressive elaboration ensures that work is defined at the appropriate level of detail for each planning horizon. For more information on the differences between these elements, check out this guide on epic, user story, and task.

This flow isn’t strictly linear or one-way. Sometimes, insights at the task level might cause teams to revisit and refine the parent user story. Similarly, as user stories are completed, the team might gain a better understanding of the epic, leading to the creation of additional stories that weren’t originally anticipated. This feedback loop is a natural part of agile development, where learning and adaptation continuously inform planning.

Cross-Dependencies to Watch For

One of the challenges in managing this hierarchy is handling dependencies between elements. A user story might depend on another story being completed first, or tasks from different stories might need to be sequenced in a specific order. These dependencies can create bottlenecks if not identified early, especially when they cross team boundaries or involve external dependencies.

Modern agile tools help visualize these dependencies through relationship links. For example, you might mark one story as “blocked by” another, or create a “depends on” relationship between tasks. These links help in planning sprints and managing daily work to avoid situations where team members are stuck waiting for dependencies to be resolved. Regular backlog refinement sessions are the ideal time to identify and manage these dependencies before they impact sprint execution.

Common Mistakes Teams Make

Even experienced agile teams sometimes struggle with the proper use of epics, user stories, and tasks. Recognizing these common pitfalls can help you avoid them in your own practice. Most issues stem from either poor granularity (elements that are too large or too small) or blurring the distinct purposes of each element type.

Creating Epics That Are Too Small

One frequent mistake is creating epics that are barely larger than user stories. This happens when teams treat epics as “slightly bigger stories” rather than as strategic initiatives. If an epic can be completed in a single sprint or describes a narrow piece of functionality, it’s probably not an epic at all. This inflation of user stories into epics clutters the backlog and diminishes the strategic value of the epic concept.

The reverse problem—epics that are too massive—can also occur. An epic like “Redesign the entire application” is too broad to be manageable and should be broken into multiple smaller epics. Properly sized epics should represent significant features or capabilities that deliver clear business value and typically take 2-3 months to complete across multiple sprints.

Writing Vague User Stories

Vague or ambiguous user stories lead to confusion, misaligned expectations, and wasted effort. Stories like “Improve the user experience” or “Make the system faster” lack the specificity needed for implementation. Good user stories are concrete, testable, and focused on a single user need or functionality. They include clear acceptance criteria that define what success looks like.

Another common mistake is writing technical tasks disguised as user stories. A story like “Refactor the authentication module” doesn’t follow the user story format because it doesn’t express a user need or benefit. Technical work is important, but it should either be captured as tasks within user-focused stories or, when substantial, as technical debt stories that still articulate the value (e.g., “As a developer, I want the authentication module refactored so that we can implement new security features more quickly”).

Skipping the Task Breakdown

Some teams pull user stories into sprints without breaking them down into tasks, thinking this saves time. This shortcut often backfires, leading to poor coordination, inaccurate progress tracking, and missed dependencies. Without explicit tasks, team members may duplicate work or miss necessary steps. The task breakdown is essential for transforming abstract requirements into concrete, actionable work items.

Equally problematic is creating tasks that are too large or vague. Tasks like “Build the feature” or “Test everything” don’t provide enough specificity for daily work management. Effective tasks are small, specific actions that can be completed in a day or less. They should be clear enough that any team member can understand what needs to be done, even if they weren’t in the sprint planning meeting.

Failing to Link Items Together

Without proper linking between epics, stories, and tasks, teams lose the benefits of the hierarchy. This disconnect makes it difficult to track progress up the chain and understand how daily work contributes to larger objectives. Most agile tools provide linking capabilities, but teams must consistently use them for the relationships to remain clear.

To avoid this mistake, establish a team convention for how items should be linked, and review these connections during backlog refinement and sprint planning. Ensure that every user story is linked to its parent epic, and every task is linked to its parent story. This discipline creates a traceable path from strategic initiatives down to daily work, improving both planning and reporting.

5 Steps to Implement This Hierarchy Correctly

Implementing the epic → user story → task hierarchy effectively requires a systematic approach. These five steps provide a framework for establishing and maintaining this structure in your agile practice. Each step builds on the previous one, creating a cohesive process from strategic planning to daily execution.

1. Start With Your Product Vision

Everything begins with a clear product vision that articulates what you’re building and why it matters. This vision guides the creation of a product roadmap, which identifies the major capabilities or features needed to realize that vision. These high-level initiatives form the foundation for your epics. Without this strategic context, epics risk becoming disconnected from business objectives.

Involve stakeholders in vision and roadmap discussions to ensure alignment between business goals and product development. This collaborative approach ensures that your epic hierarchy reflects organizational priorities and creates value for both users and the business. Revisit and refine the vision quarterly to accommodate changing market conditions or business priorities.

2. Break Vision Into Epics

Transform your roadmap into a set of well-defined epics that capture major features or capabilities. Each epic should represent a significant piece of value that can be delivered incrementally over multiple sprints. Name your epics in business language that stakeholders understand, focusing on the capability rather than the implementation. For example, “Customer Account Management” is better than “Implement User Database and UI.”

Prioritize these epics based on business value, technical dependencies, and market timing. Not all epics need to be fully defined at once – focus on elaborating the highest-priority epics first, leaving lower-priority ones at a higher level until they move up in the backlog. This progressive elaboration aligns with agile principles and prevents wasted effort defining details that might change before implementation.

3. Create User Stories From Each Epic

Once you have your priority epics identified, break them down into user stories. Focus on specific user needs or functions that deliver incremental value. Use the “As a… I want… so that…” format to ensure stories capture who the feature is for, what it does, and why it matters. Add acceptance criteria to each story to clarify what “done” looks like.

Keep stories small enough to complete within a single sprint. If a story seems too large, break it down further. Remember that user stories are not technical specifications but promises for conversations. They should provide enough detail to estimate and prioritize, but leave implementation decisions to the development team. Regularly refine stories as they move closer to implementation to incorporate new insights and address changing requirements.

4. Define Tasks For Each Story

When a user story is selected for a sprint, break it down into specific tasks during sprint planning. These tasks represent the actual work needed to implement the story according to its acceptance criteria. Include tasks for all aspects of delivery – not just coding, but also design, testing, documentation, and deployment. Make tasks specific enough that progress can be meaningfully tracked on a daily basis.

Estimate tasks in hours rather than points, aiming for tasks that take 4-8 hours to complete. If a task estimate exceeds 8 hours, consider breaking it down further. Assign tasks based on skills and capacity, ensuring no team member is overloaded. Update task status daily during standups to provide visibility into progress and identify any blockers quickly.

5. Track Progress Up The Chain

As tasks are completed, their status should roll up to show progress on the parent user story. Similarly, as stories are completed, they should update the progress on their parent epic. This chain of completion creates visibility from the tactical to the strategic level, allowing stakeholders to see how daily work contributes to larger objectives. Most agile tools automate this rollup through the linking relationships between items.

Review progress at multiple levels during different ceremonies. Daily standups focus on task status, sprint reviews examine completed user stories, and quarterly business reviews look at epic progress. This multi-level tracking ensures everyone has the right level of detail for their decision-making needs. It also helps identify when work isn’t progressing as expected, allowing for early intervention and course correction.

Tools That Support This Structure

While the epic → user story → task hierarchy can be implemented with simple tools like sticky notes or spreadsheets, purpose-built agile management tools offer significant advantages for tracking this structure. These tools provide built-in support for creating, linking, and tracking these different work items, making it easier to maintain the hierarchy and generate meaningful reports.

Jira’s Implementation

Atlassian’s Jira is perhaps the most widely used tool for implementing this hierarchy, offering native support for epics, stories, and tasks as distinct issue types. Jira’s Epic panel provides a dedicated view for managing epics and their associated stories, while the backlog and sprint views help organize stories and tasks. The tool’s linking capabilities create traceable relationships between these elements, and its extensive reporting options provide visibility into progress at all levels of the hierarchy.

Trello’s Approach

For teams seeking a simpler solution, Trello offers a more flexible, card-based approach. While Trello doesn’t have built-in concepts of epics, stories, and tasks, its customizable labels, lists, and boards can be configured to implement this hierarchy. Epics might be represented as separate boards, with stories as cards on those boards, and tasks as checklists within the cards.

The advantage of Trello is its simplicity and visual nature, which makes it accessible to non-technical team members. The tradeoff is less structured support for the hierarchy and fewer reporting options compared to more specialized tools. For small teams or simpler projects, however, this flexibility can be an advantage rather than a limitation.

Azure DevOps Options

Microsoft’s Azure DevOps (formerly VSTS) offers robust support for the epic → story → task hierarchy through its work item types and linking relationships. Its hierarchical backlog views make it easy to see the relationships between these elements and track progress at different levels. Azure DevOps also integrates tightly with development tools, creating automatic links between tasks, code changes, and builds that enhance traceability throughout the development lifecycle.

Make This Work For Your Team Today

Implementing the epic → user story → task hierarchy isn’t about rigidly following a formula – it’s about creating a clear structure that helps your team organize work effectively. Start by assessing your current approach: How do you currently break down work? What’s working well, and where do you struggle? Then, introduce these concepts incrementally, focusing on the areas where you need the most improvement. Remember that the goal is better organization and communication, not process for its own sake.

Frequently Asked Questions

Throughout my years working with agile teams, certain questions about the epic → story → task hierarchy come up consistently. These questions reflect common confusion points and edge cases that teams encounter as they implement this structure. Addressing these questions directly can help clarify these concepts and their practical application.

The answers below reflect industry best practices, but remember that agile is adaptable. Your team’s specific context might call for variations on these approaches. The most important thing is consistency within your team and clarity about how you’re using these terms.

Let’s tackle the most common questions I hear from teams working to implement this hierarchy effectively.

Can a user story exist without belonging to an epic?

Yes, user stories can exist independently of epics, especially for small enhancements or isolated features that don’t naturally fit into larger initiatives. These “orphan stories” are perfectly valid and sometimes more practical than forcing everything into the epic structure. For example, minor bug fixes or small UX improvements might not warrant creation of a dedicated epic. The key question is whether the story delivers value on its own, regardless of its relationship to an epic.

That said, most user stories should connect to epics for better organization and strategic alignment. If you find your backlog filling with too many orphan stories, it might indicate that you’re missing opportunities to group related work or that your epics are defined too narrowly. Periodically review orphan stories to see if patterns emerge that suggest new epics.

How many user stories should an epic contain?

There’s no magic number, but most epics contain between 8-15 user stories. The right size depends on your specific context, including the complexity of your product, the size of your team, and your sprint length. More important than the number is whether the epic represents a cohesive, valuable capability that can be incrementally delivered. If an epic contains fewer than 5 stories, it might be too small; if it contains more than 20, it might be too large to manage effectively.

What’s the difference between a subtask and a task?

In most agile tools, tasks and subtasks differ primarily in their relationship to other work items. A task is a direct child of a user story, representing a discrete piece of work needed to implement that story. A subtask is a child of a task, breaking it down into even smaller pieces. For example, a task might be “Implement login form,” with subtasks for “Create HTML structure,” “Add CSS styling,” and “Implement validation logic.”

Whether you need subtasks depends on the complexity of your work and your team’s preferences. Some teams find subtasks add unnecessary overhead, while others appreciate the additional granularity for complex implementation work. If most of your tasks take less than a day to complete, subtasks are probably unnecessary. For larger tasks that span multiple days or involve different skills, subtasks can improve tracking and coordination.

Should QA testing be a separate task or part of the definition of done?

This depends on your team’s structure and workflow. In a true cross-functional team where developers also perform testing, QA activities might be included in the definition of done for each task rather than as separate tasks. However, if you have dedicated QA specialists or if testing involves significant effort, creating explicit QA tasks provides better visibility and resource allocation.

How do you handle user stories that span multiple sprints?

User stories should ideally be small enough to complete within a single sprint. If a story consistently spans multiple sprints, it’s usually a sign that it’s too large and should be broken down further. However, there are legitimate cases where this might happen, such as when unexpected complexity emerges or when external dependencies cause delays.

When a story does span sprints, avoid the temptation to mark it as partially complete – stories should be either done or not done, based on their acceptance criteria. Instead, consider these approaches: 1) Split the story into smaller, independently valuable pieces that can be completed within a sprint; 2) Create a new, smaller story that captures what can be completed in the current sprint, leaving the remainder for future sprints; or 3) Return the story to the backlog and bring it into a future sprint when it can be completed in full.

By understanding and applying these core concepts of epics, user stories, and tasks, your team can create a clear structure for organizing work at different levels of detail. This hierarchy not only improves planning and tracking but also helps align daily activities with strategic objectives, ensuring everyone understands how their work contributes to larger goals. The result is more effective collaboration, better prioritization, and ultimately, faster delivery of value to your users.