User stories Memes

The eternal product development paradox in four panels! When a product manager demands a flashy new feature, developers ask the reasonable question: "Do our users actually need this?" Then comes the power move—the PM dramatically declares "Look at me. I am the user" with the intensity of someone who's never opened the app outside a demo. This is basically every feature prioritization meeting where actual user research got replaced by executive gut feelings. The "I am the user" declaration is the software development equivalent of "because I said so" from your childhood.

This meme perfectly captures the evolution of "epics" in software development with the classic "then vs now" format using the Doge meme. On the left side ("Epics then"), we see a muscular, heroic Doge dressed as a Greek warrior with a lengthy epic poem from Homer's Iliad - representing how epics used to be grand, detailed narratives with elaborate scope and planning. On the right side ("Epics now"), there's just a regular Doge with the simple request "plz add a button" - hilariously showing how modern software development "epics" have been watered down to sometimes include trivial tasks that hardly deserve such an important-sounding classification. This perfectly captures the frustration many developers feel when working with agile methodologies where the term "epic" (meant to represent a large body of work) is often misused for simple feature requests. It's also poking fun at how project management terminology gets diluted over time in real-world practice.