Agent skill · product strategy · borghei
story-splitting
Vertical-slicing playbook with 9 canonical Lawrence patterns for splitting epics into shippable user stories without losing user value. Use when a story is too big, exceeds cycle time, or fails INVEST-S.
Why this skill is useful
Provides a structured playbook with 9 specific patterns for splitting user stories that enhance the AI's understanding of agile project management.
What it needs
About 4k tokens when loaded. Last updated 2026-07-21. 462 stars on the source repository.
What this skill does
Story Splitting (Vertical Slicing Patterns) Overview A pattern catalog for splitting epics and large stories into smaller, shippable, end-to-end slices that still deliver user value. Built on Richard Lawrence's canonical story-splitting flowchart (the 9 patterns most product teams converge on) with worked before/after examples and a quick-reference decision tree. The single most common reason teams fail to deliver predictably is that stories are too large. Large stories balloon in cycle time (see cycle-time-analyzer/), create coordination overhead, and resist incremental release. The remedy is not to estimate more carefully; it is to split smaller — vertically, so each slice (1) delivers value the end user can perceive, (2) fits in a single sprint, (3) is independently shippable, and (4) passes INVEST quality gates (see wwas/). The skill is pattern-based — no Python tool is needed; the value is the recipes and the worked examples. Core Capabilities 9 canonical Lawrence patterns — workflow steps, business-rule variations, happy/unhappy path, input/output variations, data variations, data-entry methods, deferred performance/quality, CRUD operations, and break-out-a-spike (plus optional "Major Effort First"). Vertical-slicing decision tree — a top-down tree that names the first applicable pattern for any oversized story. Vertical-vs-horizontal discipline — keeps every slice end-to-end and demoable instead of layer-by-layer. Ordering & INVEST gating — sequences slices smallest-value-first and verifies each against I-N-V-E-S-T. When to Use Sprint refinement -- A story exceeds the team's 85th-percentile cycle time or fails the INVEST-S (Small) test. Epic decomposition -- An epic from create-prd/ or story-mapping/ needs to be broken into a release backlog. Stuck story -- A story has been "almost done" for two sprints; usually a sign it should have been split. New team onboarding -- A team's stories are routinely too large; introduce the patterns explicitly. …
How to use it
Reference it in AdaL, Claude Code, Cursor or any coding agent — nothing to install:
@skills borghei/story-splitting