
Show HN: HipSpec – User Stories/Requirements as a Service - masonhensley
https://hipspec.com/?showhn
======
masonhensley
Hey HN, I left my role running tech & security at a VC backed healthcare
company a few months ago to scratch a multi year itch that I’ve had since a
brutal multi hour sprint planning meeting during my time at a Fortune 50.

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://youtu.be/6jGBVN_ab_U)

\-
[https://www.loom.com/share/9afd3225b0e3418da802278f2bea9e33](https://www.loom.com/share/9afd3225b0e3418da802278f2bea9e33)

Some Screenshots (via rough docs):
[https://docs.hipspec.com/docs/workflows/story-spec-
pushing/](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](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.

