Epics are often treated like slogans. “Revolutionise the customer experience.” “Deliver world-class onboarding.” They sparkle with ambition, but when you read them closely, they say very little.
An epic isn’t meant to be a catchphrase. It’s a structural artefact — a vessel that carries strategic intent through churn, context-switching, and delivery pressure.
At their best, epics act as strategic contracts of value, translating high-level vision into commitments that outlast the people in the room. At their worst, they obscure direction, leaving teams to improvise.
Epics as Structural Anchors
Epics sit at the intersection of product and UX. They hold the macro responsibility for showing how features deliver value to both the business and the customer.
When written well, an epic preserves the narrative logic of the product. A product manager can step into a new team, or a stakeholder can rotate out, and the intent doesn’t vanish — it’s already encoded. That durability is what makes epics unique: they are not just containers for work, but structural expressions of intent.
Consider a UX example: research uncovers that customers abandon checkout because they don’t trust the delivery and returns flow. A clear epic — “Reduce mobile checkout drop-off by addressing trust signals (delivery, returns, payments)” — does more than outline tasks. It positions the work within a strategic arc: solving a user pain point in a way that also satisfies business objectives.
The epic is an anchor, ensuring that UX input and product priorities speak the same language.
The Trap of the Shiny but Hollow Epic
Compare this with the polished but empty epic: “Revolutionise the customer experience.” It looks impressive on the board but hides its hollowness. Each function interprets it differently —
- Design thinks UI overhaul
- Engineering thinks performance optimisation
- Marketing imagines a campaign
Everyone nods, but nobody is aligned.
This is how strategy gets diluted. The epic fails to encode direction, so the team improvises. Meetings multiply, slide decks circulate, and stakeholders jockey for influence.
The artefact becomes a liability.
For UX in particular, this collapse is costly. Research and design outputs risk being sidelined, treated as tactical suggestions rather than strategic drivers. Without a well-framed epic, there is no bridge connecting user insight to business value.
When Strategy is Embedded, Trust Follows
The proof of a strong epic isn’t in how inspiring it looks, but in how little translation it requires. A well-framed epic reduces the need for clarification meetings because the intent is already explicit.
This is where trust compounds. Teams trust each other when they don’t need to re-explain direction. Stakeholders trust the product function when epics map directly to outcomes. And UX finds its voice when research insights are visible as strategic anchors, not buried as tactical afterthoughts.
Strong epics endure because they encode strategy. They show how the product creates value, how features serve both users and the business, and how UX contributions shape outcomes. They are, in essence, strategic contracts of value.
Conclusion
An epic isn’t just a large story or a backlog container. It’s the artefact that sustains strategic clarity through churn, pressure, and competing voices.
When written as strategic contracts of value, epics preserve intent, carry user needs into business discussions, and align delivery with purpose. When reduced to polished slogans, they leave teams drifting, improvising, and mistrusting the very artefacts that should guide them.
The hidden cost of polished but empty epics isn’t simply wasted time. It’s the erosion of strategic clarity — and no team can afford that.
Strategic Markers
The Cost of Empty Epics
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Epics that read like slogans
Strategy is being diluted into surface polish
Teams lose direction when artefacts sound ambitious but say very little - Frequent “alignment meetings” to decode artefactsSignals that strategy is missing from compositionIf intent lived inside the epic, meetings wouldn’t need to translate it
- UX insights sidelined as tactical noiseIndicates the absence of strategic scaffoldingUser value gets lost in delivery churn.
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Stakeholder churn disrupts continuity
New people can’t read intent directly from epicsArtefacts are failing to preserve strategic vision - Trust rising or eroding without clear causeTeam confidence can fluctuateReflects if epics embed outcomes that align business and user value
- Epics that frame outcomes, not outputsFocus on value delivered rather than features shippedMarker of strategy that endures through churn and change
