Everything a company builds starts with a vision. This vision is usually articulated by the CEO or the founding team and represents a long-term aspiration about where the company wants to go, what kind of impact it wants to create, and how it wants to be perceived by customers and the market. However, vision alone does not produce results. Between a high-level aspiration and a product that users can actually interact with, there is a long chain of decisions, priorities, trade-offs, and execution steps. Understanding epics is essential to navigating this chain.
In product management, epics play a crucial role in transforming vision into structured, actionable work. They act as a bridge between strategy and execution, helping teams organize complex initiatives, align around outcomes, and deliver value incrementally. Without epics, product teams often struggle with fragmented backlogs, disconnected features, and a lack of clarity about how day-to-day work contributes to broader company goals.
This article introduces the concept of epics, explains why they exist, and shows how they fit into the overall flow of product development—from vision and metrics to initiatives, releases, and continuous improvement.
From Vision to Goals and Metrics
A company’s vision is intentionally broad. It is meant to inspire, guide decision-making, and provide direction over years rather than weeks or months. Because of that, it cannot be executed directly. To become actionable, vision needs to be translated into concrete goals.
Goals are statements of intent that describe what the company wants to achieve within a certain time frame. Unlike vision, goals are measurable. They are usually expressed through metrics that reflect business outcomes, such as growth, retention, engagement, revenue, operational efficiency, or customer satisfaction. Metrics make goals tangible and allow teams to evaluate whether progress is actually being made.
For example, a company with a vision of becoming the most accessible communication platform in its region might define goals related to user growth in new markets, improved onboarding success rates, or increased usage among non-English-speaking users. Metrics such as activation rate, weekly active users, or feature adoption would then be used to track progress toward those goals.
At this stage, the organization knows what it wants to achieve, but not yet how. That “how” is where product teams come in.
Initiatives as the First Level of Action
Once goals and metrics are defined, teams need to decide which initiatives are most likely to move those metrics in the right direction. Initiatives are high-level efforts designed to achieve specific outcomes. They are still abstract, but they are much closer to execution than vision or goals.
An initiative might involve improving a key user flow, expanding the product to new markets, reducing technical debt that affects reliability, or enabling a new revenue stream. Importantly, initiatives are outcome-oriented. They are not simply lists of features; they are hypotheses about what kind of work will help the company reach its goals.
This is where many organizations face a challenge. If initiatives are not clearly structured, teams may jump straight from goals to individual features or tasks. The result is often a backlog filled with isolated items that are difficult to prioritize and even harder to connect back to strategic objectives. Epics exist precisely to solve this problem.
What Is an Epic?
An epic is a large body of work that groups together multiple features, functionalities, or tasks that collectively deliver a meaningful outcome. In other words, an epic represents a significant initiative that is too large to be completed in a single sprint and too complex to be captured by a single user story.
Epics help product teams organize work around outcomes rather than isolated deliverables. They provide a shared understanding of what the team is trying to achieve and why that effort matters. While individual features or stories describe specific behaviors or capabilities, an epic tells a broader story about value.
For example, “Translate the app to Spanish” can be considered an epic. On the surface, it sounds like a simple feature, but in practice it involves multiple pieces of work: updating user interfaces, handling localization in the backend, adjusting onboarding flows, updating customer support content, and potentially addressing legal or compliance considerations. All of these efforts contribute to a single outcome: making the product accessible to Spanish-speaking users.
Similarly, “Implement photo sharing in direct messages” might involve changes to the messaging interface, media storage, privacy controls, performance optimizations, and moderation rules. Treating this as an epic allows the team to think holistically about the experience rather than delivering a fragmented solution.
Epics Are Not Always User-Facing Features
One common misconception is that epics always result in new features that users can see. In reality, many epics are internal or technical in nature. They may focus on improving scalability, reliability, security, compliance, or developer productivity. Even though users might not directly notice these changes, they often have a significant impact on product quality and business outcomes.
For instance, an epic focused on “Improving system reliability during peak traffic” might include work on infrastructure, monitoring, automated testing, and incident response processes. The outcome is fewer outages and better performance, which ultimately improves user satisfaction and trust. Calling this type of work an epic acknowledges its strategic importance, even if it does not produce a visible feature.
This distinction is one of the reasons product teams talk about epics rather than just features. The term “epic” emphasizes scope, duration, and impact, not just user-visible functionality.
Epics vs. Features vs. User Stories
To understand epics properly, it is important to distinguish them from other common product artifacts. A feature typically describes a specific capability that provides value to the user. A user story is an even smaller unit of work, written from the user’s perspective and designed to be completed within a single sprint.
Epics sit above both features and user stories in terms of scope. They group together related features and stories under a single outcome-oriented umbrella. If a piece of work can be completed within one sprint, it should not be an epic. In that case, it is more appropriate to represent it as a user story or a small set of stories.
This hierarchy helps teams manage complexity. Epics provide structure at a higher level, while user stories enable detailed planning and execution at the sprint level. When used correctly, they work together to create a clear and traceable flow from strategy to delivery.
Why Epics Usually Span Multiple Sprints
Software development is inherently uncertain. Requirements evolve, technical constraints emerge, and teams learn more about the problem space as they build. Epics acknowledge this reality by allowing work to unfold over multiple sprints.
Because epics represent larger initiatives, they are rarely fully defined upfront. Instead, they are refined over time as the team gains insight and feedback. This iterative approach reduces risk and encourages learning. Rather than committing to a rigid plan, teams can adjust scope, priorities, and solutions while still working toward a clear outcome.
This is another reason why epics are so valuable. They provide enough structure to align the team without forcing premature decisions about implementation details. They create space for collaboration between product, design, and engineering, which is essential for building high-quality software.
How Epics Connect Strategy to Execution
At their best, epics act as a translation layer between business strategy and daily development work. They help product managers explain why certain initiatives matter, how they relate to company goals, and what success looks like. For engineers and designers, epics provide context that goes beyond individual tickets, making work more meaningful and cohesive.
From a planning perspective, epics also support better prioritization. When teams evaluate their roadmap, they can compare epics based on expected impact, effort, and alignment with strategic objectives. This is far more effective than prioritizing hundreds of individual stories in isolation.
Epics also make communication with stakeholders easier. Instead of discussing low-level details, product managers can talk about progress at the epic level, focusing on outcomes and learning rather than task completion. This creates more productive conversations and helps manage expectations.
Setting the Stage for What Comes Next
Understanding epics is only the first step. Once an epic is defined, it needs to be documented, refined, and broken down into executable pieces. This is where epic spec sheets, user stories, acceptance criteria, and estimation practices come into play.
In the next article of this series, we will explore how epic spec sheets help align product, design, and engineering around a shared understanding of what needs to be built. We will look at how documentation, when done correctly, becomes a tool for clarity and collaboration rather than bureaucracy.
Epics provide the structure. Specs provide the clarity. Together, they enable teams to move from vision to delivery in a way that is intentional, measurable, and adaptable.
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