The current state. Make it specific, human, and costly. Avoid "legacy challenges" and "technical debt": name the actual human experience. "Six engineers spend 40% of their time on a batch job that runs every 3 hours and produces 12 manual corrections a day" is real. "Legacy infrastructure" is not.
The moment that makes the status quo untenable. Regulatory change. A competitive loss. An outage with a dollar figure attached. A deadline. A board mandate. Without an inciting incident, the story has no urgency, and without urgency, decisions stall.
What the architecture enables: in human and business terms. Not "we'll implement Azure Data Factory and Synapse Analytics." Instead: "The finance team will see consolidated P&L data in 15 minutes instead of 3 days. The 6 engineers will stop running corrections and start building the forecasting model they've been told to deprioritize for 18 months."
What the customer's customers, employees, or partners experience differently. This is the outcome the sponsor can take to their board. It should be specific enough to be verifiable and inspirational enough to be worth the cost of the transformation.
Write the 3-sentence version your sponsor can tell their CEO in an elevator. It must survive the "so what?" test three times: once per sentence.
| Risk | Present? (Y/N) | Mitigation |
|---|---|---|
| The story relies on technical credibility rather than business relevance | ||
| The story is true but unverifiable: no data, no reference, no specificity | ||
| The story doesn't address the sponsor's known objection (the story misses the room) | ||
| The story is about Microsoft / Azure, not about the customer |