How User Stories Are Sabotaging Your Salesforce Projects and Why That’s Exactly What You Need

In Salesforce consulting, the ability to create outstanding user stories often appears to be the holy grail that most look to as to how to display their competency as a Salesforce project leader.  

For a consultant, a user story is the well-known tool we use to collect client requirements. It's usually quite involved and requires a certain attention to nuance and detail. As such, user stories are documentation of a client’s self-understanding as a business.

This is why every successful project is rooted in them, every sprint relies on them, and every delivery celebrates ticking them off. If that’s how you’re running things, congratulations, you’re doing it wrong!

Here’s the uncomfortable truth: user stories are overrated. 

To be clear, they’re not "bad" in themselves, and, spoiler alert, I’m not here to launch a tirade against them (far from it, actually). I fully acknowledge that the structure, clarity, and shared language they bring to a project team can be invaluable. 

But neither would I expect an artist worth their salt to go on a diatribe against watercolors, a musician on a crusade against subwoofers, or an MD to troll medical chart best practices.

Rather, just like artists whose only issue with certain tools is that they may be used as substitutes for truly having a vision, the problem for project leadership is how we can become entrenched in myopia - focusing on what’s right in front of us without consideration of what’s ahead in the distance.

Thus, this isn't some moralistic reaction against common consulting tools, but the way we routinely lean on them to levels that lack any true vision or creativity. 

When project leaders treat them as the blueprint for solving the most important problems, that's the problem. We so often avoid confronting complexity, uncertainty, and the hard questions that drive actual business transformation when we lean so heavily on a tool that it becomes a crutch. This kind of over-reliance on a tool is often a symptom of an anxious project leadership style that’s more about controlling chaos than having the intellectual courage necessary for solving real problems for our partners. 

The Comfort of Control

There’s a reason why everyone loves user stories; they routinely give the project team the security of control, and control routinely comes in under budget, meets client expectations, and ends with CSAT scores near 5. When you can break down a project into neat little tasks, it gives you a sense of order in the midst of chaos. 

Safe, controlled, meets client expectations (check, check, check!)

But here’s some more truth: embracing chaos and uncertainty is what ultimately offers the most value for everyone; partners and clients. Let me give you a real-world example from my past, in a time before joining Arkus. I will remember this one particular "well-constructed user story" forever. 

“As a sales manager, I want leads automatically routed to the right team based on region and industry so that I can eliminate manual lead distribution.”

Sounds great, right? Straightforward, logical, and exactly what they needed. Except, not really.

What we came to find out during stakeholder interviews was that they actually needed a complete overhaul of their lead management process, and the reasons went far deeper than the user story could ever portray. Here’s what we discovered when we dug in: Sales reps were cherry-picking leads, bypassing the automated routing, and manually entering leads they thought were worth their time. The manual distribution wasn’t just an inconvenience; it was a symptom of a broken sales culture that had no trust in its own operational processes.

Automating the lead routing without addressing the underlying issue of trust in the process would have further entrenched the problem. Sales managers didn’t have proper oversight into how reps were handling leads, and the reps themselves didn't trust the lead-scoring models being used. The story they handed us was about automation, but what they actually needed was transparency and accountability; they needed to fix the incentive structure and their scoring methodologies, and provide better training on lead qualification. Only once those more systemic problems were addressed did automation of lead distribution begin to make sense. 

This changed significantly how the project would be scoped, as they began to discover the weight of a problem that was never supposed to be a factor for the engagement in the first place.

The lesson? 

User stories run the risk of giving us a false sense of security. They make us think we’re solving the problem, when, often, we’re just moving pieces around without addressing the real issues that drive the need for change. Real progress comes from pushing past the user story and confronting the bigger mess head-on.

The Root of the Problem: Fear

Again, why do we find ourselves clinging to user stories so often? 

Because we’re afraid of uncertainty. 

We’re afraid of the complexity and potential conflict that comes with real business transformation. User stories are safe. They let us reduce complexity into small, manageable chunks. But business transformation isn’t necessarily safe. It’s messy, ambiguous, and quite often very uncomfortable.

This is the heart of the issue. Consultants and project leaders alike are stuck in project management routines clamoring toward safety rather than appropriate challenges; ones concerned with avoiding failure rather than achieving success. User stories allow us to avoid uncomfortable questions like, “Is this even the right approach?” or, “What happens if we challenge the whole process?”

The result? We keep ourselves busy ticking off boxes and delivering features, all while avoiding the big, messy problems that actually need solving.

Toward Courageous Consulting

So are you ready to tackle the big problems? It's time to invest in consulting services that embrace this distinctly courageous type of partnership. The internet is full of people who can "build things" and who can always find ways to underbid, but what routinely sets courageous consulting apart from the rest of the gig economy is the fact that this sort of courageous consulting has the potential for far greater ROI than those consultants simply translating to user stories and building the related "thing." 

It's the difference between having a true business partner and a glorified employee. 

This is why I always build those expectations into any engagement I take on because I want them to know what they are actually buying with their investment. They are not buying "technical expertise" per se, but courageous consulting that may challenge their assumptions in a more substantial way than they may get elsewhere.

Why You Might Need to Break the Story

Here’s where it gets even more real: the best Salesforce project leaders are the ones who are willing to break user stories. Not because the stories are "wrong," but because they’re too often too narrow. The rest fall into the trap of being too focused on delivering a task and not enough on solving the actual problem.

Remember that project with the broken lead qualification process? The automation they asked for would have solved the wrong problem. We had to tear apart the user story to get to the “why.” 

Why was manual lead distribution an issue? Because the data was a mess. Why wasn’t the automation going to help? Because no one trusted the data anyway.

By breaking the story, we uncovered the real solution: fixing their lead qualification process, implementing better data governance, and retraining the sales teams around a common vision. That was the solution they didn’t know they needed, and, to be blunt, it was not entirely unlike an episode of Intervention when we brought this observation to the attention of their executive stakeholders. 

But it’s the one solution that actually moved the needle for this client.

Because of the risky nature of the conversation, it was a project we risked losing by confronting them on an issue by which someone could have been deeply offended.

The Courage to (Actually) Lead Projects

At the end of the day, project leadership is about embracing uncertainty and staying calm in the face of it. The best project leaders, and the best consultants, don’t hide behind the neat, ordered world of user stories. They embrace the chaos and lead through them.

The best consultants won’t just execute a list of tasks handed to them in user stories. Our job is to drive real transformation. This means a willingness to break the story, challenge assumptions, and yes, risk facing the messiness head-on rather than taking the path of least resistance. 

Skilled consulting is ultimately about following the tenets of mature leadership; that is, (1) intellectual courage, (2) maintaining a presence of non-anxiety, and (3) the capacity to maintain and negotiate a vision.

This often includes, contrary to some opinions, the willingness to embrace being uncomfortable as a natural part of your work, as a matter of principle. It means going beyond what’s written in the user story and asking the hard questions. Because the real answers aren’t written down; they’re uncovered through distinctly courageous inquiry.

Do you know your user story? Reach out to Arkus through our contact form to learn how we can help your team clarify your platform requirements. We also invite you to stay connected to us by following Arkus on LinkedIn, and subscribing to our newsletter and events lists, using the form in the sidebar to the right.