How a PM writes and refines user stories engineers can build and test
Company: Booking.com
Role: Product Manager
Category: Product / Decision Making
Difficulty: medium
Interview Round: Other
Walk me through how you write user stories, from where a story starts to the point the team picks it up. Which practices have proven most useful to you?
```hint Use one story as the spine
Describe your process through a single story you actually wrote, following it from the problem it came from to the moment the team agreed it was done.
```
### Clarifying Questions
- Should I describe the format of a single story, or the whole flow from discovery to a refined backlog?
- Is this for a team that plans in sprints with refinement sessions, or one that pulls work continuously?
- Should I include how I handle technical or platform work that has no obvious end user?
### What a Strong Answer Covers
- Where stories come from: the problem, evidence and outcome each one traces back to
- How a single story is written and split so it is small, testable and valuable on its own
- Acceptance criteria and supporting context: designs, edge cases, analytics and what is out of scope
- How engineering, design and QA shape stories before they are committed
- Specific practices backed by evidence that they helped, and how the candidate checks whether a story delivered its benefit
### Follow-up Questions
- An engineer says your story is too big to finish in one sprint. How do you split it?
- How do you write a story for work with no direct user, such as a database migration?
- After a release, how do you tell whether a story was well written?
Overview: A product manager execution question asking how the candidate writes user stories and which practices make them work. It tests turning product goals into small, testable stories, writing acceptance criteria, splitting work vertically, refining stories with engineering and design, and checking the outcome after release.