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Product Management vocabulary · Requirements & User Stories

Epic

Meaning in product management, with examples

/ˈepɪk/nounCore term

In product management, epic means: A large piece of work that is too big for one sprint and is broken down into several smaller user stories, such as “Multi-currency support”.

In Turkish: epik, büyük iş paketi

How it is used

Used in Jira and similar tools to group related stories. PMs create, break down and close epics, and report progress on them to stakeholders. In everyday English epic means heroic or great; in agile work it only means a large body of work.

Example sentences

  1. The new checkout epic has twelve stories, and eight are done.

  2. Let's break this epic down before sprint planning.

Common collocations

  • create an epic
  • break down an epic
  • epic owner
  • link a story to an epic
  • user storyA short description of a feature written from the user's point of view, usually in the form “As a [type of user], I want [goal] so that [benefit].”
  • backlogAn ordered list of all the work a product team might do, such as features, improvements and bug fixes, with the most important items at the top.
  • initiativeA large, planned piece of work aimed at a specific business goal, usually made up of several epics and often involving more than one team.
  • story pointsA unit that agile teams use to estimate the relative size of a user story, combining effort, complexity and uncertainty instead of counting hours.
  • backlog refinementRegular work in which the product owner and the team review upcoming backlog items, clarify them, split large ones and estimate them so they are ready for a sprint.

This word in other fields

The same English word can have a different meaning in another field:

More terms: Requirements & User Stories

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