User Story

Create user stories with Mike Cohn format and Gherkin acceptance criteria. Use when turning user needs into development-ready work with clear outcomes and testable conditions.

7,800 stars 940 forksWriting & Content

Install

skills CLI (Claude Code, Cursor, Codex and more)
npx skills add deanpeters/Product-Manager-Skills --skill user-story
Manual install
git clone --depth 1 https://github.com/deanpeters/Product-Manager-Skills.git /tmp/Product-Manager-Skills
mkdir -p ~/.claude/skills
cp -r /tmp/Product-Manager-Skills/skills/user-story ~/.claude/skills/user-story

Personal skills live in ~/.claude/skills. Use .claude/skills in a project folder to share a skill with your team.

From the SKILL.md

## Purpose
Create clear, concise user stories that combine Mike Cohn's user story format with Gherkin-style acceptance criteria. Use this to translate user needs into actionable development work that focuses on outcomes, ensures shared understanding between product and engineering, and provides testable success criteria.

This is not a feature spec—it's a conversation starter that captures *who* benefits, *what* they're trying to do, *why* it matters, and *how* you'll know it works.

## Input

**Works best with:** The feature or user need the story captures.
**Also useful:** The user role, the outcome they want, and edge cases the acceptance criteria must cover.

Anything supplied with the invocation itself — text after the skill name, a pasted context dump, or an appended `ARGUMENTS:` line — counts as answers already given. Use it and skip whatever it covers; don't re-ask.

**Arriving empty-handed? That works too.** The skill asks who the user is and what they're trying to accomplish before drafting story and Gherkin criteria.

**Example invocation:** `Write user stories for password reset via SMS for our banking app — include the lockout edge case.`

## Key Concepts

### The Mike Cohn + Gherkin Format
A user story combines:

**Use Case (Mike Cohn format):**
- **As a** [user persona/role]
- **I want to** [action to achieve outcome]
- **so that** [desired outcome]

**Acceptance Criteria (Gherkin format):**
- **Scenario:** [Brief description of the scenario]
Read the full skill on GitHub

Details

Skill name
user-story
Path
skills/user-story/SKILL.md
Repo updated
16 October 2026

FAQ

What does the User Story skill do?

Create user stories with Mike Cohn format and Gherkin acceptance criteria. Use when turning user needs into development-ready work with clear outcomes and testable conditions.

How do I install the User Story skill?

skills CLI (Claude Code, Cursor, Codex and more): npx skills add deanpeters/Product-Manager-Skills --skill user-story. Skills go in ~/.claude/skills (personal) or .claude/skills (project), and Claude loads them automatically when a task matches the description.

Is User Story popular?

It lives in deanpeters/Product-Manager-Skills, which has 7,800 GitHub stars and 940 forks, and is included in 3 curated skill lists.

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