Show HN: HipSpec – User Stories/Requirements as a Service
hipspec.com
hipspec.com
Over the last few years, I’ve found myself in deja vu moments coaching Subject Matter Experts (SME’s), Product Managers, developers on their user stories & requirements for normal stuff we see in most software applications... Think user management, forgotten password flows, csv uploads, common customer service tasks etc - mostly solved problems from both an Engineering & UX perspective. The problem is that teams keep reinventing the wheel on these basics at the product level before code is written. It frustrates product teams as meetings and product debt build up and users end up taking their share of the pain. So I went down the rabbit hole and analyzed ~200 well built products, gathered “all the things” (about 800 “Story Specs” + Acceptance Criteria) & created a tool for importing them into project management tools.
Thesis: 60-80% of the software built by most teams is a solved problem. If we can better automate the definition of the basics earlier in the life-cycle via a common vernacular, there will be more bandwidth for smart people to do smart things. (I’ve got a blog post brewing about Maslow’s hierarchy of product needs & how innovation/ smart people get dragged down.)
Here’s a quick video of the tool (same video, loom & youtube depending on your preference):
- https://youtu.be/6jGBVN_ab_U
- https://www.loom.com/share/9afd3225b0e3418da802278f2bea9e33
Some Screenshots (via rough docs): https://docs.hipspec.com/docs/workflows/story-spec-pushing/
Free tier has some random user stories & will be further built out with listings to help get Open Source Projects into team backlogs… tangent for another time. Registration Link: https://app.hipspec.com/users/sign_up
Random thanks to @jason, @mijustin, @jonbuda, @derrickreimer, @r00k, @robwalling & @GrantM for their podcasts that have given me consistent company while working on this. And Startup School, what a blast. Thanks for checking out HipSpec.com, I'm around for feedback & chit chat.
TLDR: I identified ~800 user story primitives + associated acceptance criteria that are relevant to most software product teams & made them easy to import into backlogs.