In Agile development, Epics play a crucial role in turning high-level product goals into actionable, meaningful work. While they may look like just another item on the backlog at first glance, Epics are much more than that—they’re strategic work containers designed to deliver significant value through collaboration across various roles on the Agile team.
Whether you’re a Business Analyst, Product Owner, QA specialist, or developer, understanding how to manage and contribute to an Epic is essential to delivering features that matter. This guide explores how Epics function, who is involved, how they’re broken down, and how they help organizations execute on big ideas—one sprint at a time.
What Is an Epic?
An Epic is a large body of work that can be broken down into smaller tasks (usually user stories) and typically spans multiple sprints. It’s usually aligned with a strategic initiative or a major feature within a product roadmap. Epics help bridge the gap between business goals and day-to-day development tasks.
Think of an Epic as a north star for a project team: it’s a direction, a purpose, and a container for many pieces of work that, together, accomplish something significant.
Unlike a single user story, an Epic:
Spans time and teams
Requires collaboration across disciplines
Is tied to key performance indicators (KPIs) and business outcomes
Provides room for flexibility and adaptation
Why Are Epics Important?
Epics play a central role in scaling Agile practices by helping teams:
Stay focused on long-term value
Deliver in increments without losing sight of the big picture
Track progress on complex features
Coordinate efforts across multiple squads or departments
They also help leadership prioritize what’s worth investing in, providing transparency into where time, budget, and talent are being directed.
Key Roles Involved in Epic Execution
Delivering an Epic is a team sport. Here’s how each role contributes to making it successful:
📌 Business Analyst (BA): Connecting Vision to Detail
BAs are the information architects who ensure that what’s being built aligns with what the business truly needs.
Key Responsibilities:
Defining the scope: Partner with stakeholders to understand business goals and translate them into requirements.
Bridging communication gaps: Ensure that technical teams and business partners are on the same page.
Clarifying details: Document use cases, workflows, and edge cases that support implementation.
Ongoing feedback: Stay engaged during development to adjust and refine based on stakeholder input.
📌 Product Owner (PO): Setting the Strategic Direction
The PO is the custodian of the product vision. They ensure the team is solving the right problem for the right users.
Key Responsibilities:
Epic visioning: Translate product goals into Epics that reflect valuable functionality.
Backlog management: Prioritize user stories derived from the Epic.
Balancing needs: Manage trade-offs between user needs, business goals, and technical feasibility.
Acceptance criteria: Define what “done” looks like for each user story and for the Epic as a whole.
📌 Quality Assurance (QA): Safeguarding the Experience
QA teams are the guardians of quality. They test and validate that the Epic’s outcomes meet user expectations and function as intended.
Key Responsibilities:
Test planning: Create comprehensive test strategies aligned with Epic goals.
Continuous testing: Work in parallel with developers to catch issues early.
User acceptance testing (UAT): Organize and lead real-user validations to ensure the product meets needs before release.
Regression and performance checks: Ensure new features don’t disrupt existing systems.
📌 Developers: Bringing It All to Life
Developers turn ideas into working code, transforming stories within an Epic into shippable software.
Key Responsibilities:
Breaking down requirements: Translate stories into technical tasks.
Collaboration: Pair with QA, BA, and PO for clarifications and refinements.
Incremental delivery: Build and deploy features in smaller batches across sprints.
Refactoring and optimization: Maintain high-quality, scalable, and secure code.
From Epic to Execution: The Lifecycle
An Epic goes through several stages from idea to delivery. Here’s a closer look at the lifecycle:
1. Epic Initiation
The PO or stakeholder raises a large idea tied to business strategy.
The BA conducts initial discovery to understand the problem and its impact.
2. Scope Definition and Decomposition
The BA and PO break the Epic into user stories—smaller, manageable chunks of value.
Each story addresses a distinct user need or piece of functionality.
3. Prioritization and Backlog Refinement
The PO orders stories based on business value, complexity, and dependencies.
Stories are refined with input from dev and QA to ensure they’re ready for sprints.
4. Sprint Planning and Execution
Teams select stories from the Epic during sprint planning.
Developers and QA execute and test, delivering working functionality incrementally.
5. Demo, Feedback, and Adjustments
Stakeholders review completed work during sprint reviews.
The team incorporates feedback, re-scopes if necessary, and continues development.
6. Epic Completion
Once all related stories meet their acceptance criteria, the Epic is marked complete.
The PO reviews results against the original goals and KPIs.
Real-World Example: Mobile Payment Feature Epic
Let’s say a fintech company wants to build a “Pay in App” feature for its mobile banking platform.
Epic Goal: Let users securely complete payments within the app.
Breakdown:
User Authentication (Story 1)
Link Payment Method (Story 2)
UI for Payment Form (Story 3)
Integrate Payment Gateway (Story 4)
Receipt & Confirmation Flow (Story 5)
BA’s Role: Interview stakeholders, analyze compliance needs, define success metrics.
PO’s Role: Prioritize stories, align delivery timeline with release goals.
QA’s Role: Design tests for all flows and edge cases, including invalid inputs and network failures.
Developers’ Role: Build APIs, develop frontend views, and connect third-party services.
Over several sprints, the Epic is implemented, tested, and refined based on user feedback, ultimately delivering a feature that boosts engagement and retention.
Common Challenges in Managing Epics
Even with strong teamwork, working with Epics comes with challenges. Here’s how Agile teams handle them:
⚠️ Scope Creep
The Problem: The Epic keeps growing as more ideas come in.
Solution: Define a clear scope and success criteria early. Use story mapping to visualize limits.
⚠️ Cross-Team Dependencies
The Problem: Work requires coordination between multiple teams or departments.
Solution: Use tools like dependency maps and conduct joint planning sessions.
⚠️ Misalignment with Business Goals
The Problem: The Epic starts to diverge from its original purpose.
Solution: Regular stakeholder check-ins and sprint reviews help maintain alignment.
⚠️ Testing Bottlenecks
The Problem: QA gets overwhelmed toward the end of the Epic.
Solution: Integrate continuous testing and include QA early in story planning.
How Epics Enable Strategic Agility
From a business perspective, Epics are more than just work containers—they are drivers of strategic execution.
✅ Aligning Work with Vision
Epics ensure that what teams are building ties back to broader organizational goals, such as revenue growth, customer satisfaction, or market expansion.
✅ Enabling Risk Management
By delivering value incrementally, teams reduce the risk of building the wrong thing or going over budget.
✅ Supporting Innovation
Epics give teams the space to explore big ideas in a structured way, balancing creativity with delivery discipline.
Best Practices for Managing Epics
Always define the “Why.” Make sure everyone understands the business value behind the Epic.
Collaborate early and often. BA, PO, QA, and dev should align from day one.
Use story mapping. Visualize the Epic to clarify the journey for users and the team.
Document decisions. Keep track of key choices to avoid confusion as the Epic evolves.
Celebrate milestones. Completing user stories tied to an Epic deserves recognition—it builds momentum and morale.
Epics Are a Team Effort
An Epic is not just a large backlog item. It’s a shared mission. It represents what a team can achieve when they align around a big idea and break it down into meaningful, deliverable parts.
With clear communication, continuous collaboration, and strategic thinking, Agile teams can use Epics to:
Build impactful features
Solve real-world problems
Deliver measurable value
Whether you’re refining the scope as a BA, prioritizing the next sprint as a PO, safeguarding the quality as QA, or shipping the code as a developer—your role in the Epic matters.
Suggested Discussion Questions for Your Team:
How do we currently define and scope Epics?
Are we involving the right roles early enough?
How could we improve collaboration around large initiatives?
Do our Epics clearly connect to strategic goals?