User Story Management with Artificial Intelligence
StoryWeaver and GenAI at UNICRE
ABOUT THIS SUCCESS STORY
UNICRE faced challenges in creating clear user stories aligned between business and technology. With StoryWeaver, a product developed by Xpand IT and powered by GenAI, the company was able to automate and structure this process while maintaining human oversight. The result was greater efficiency, less rework, and higher quality in deliveries.
SCOPE OF THIS SOLUTION
- StoryWeaver
- Generative AI
- User Story generation
- Azure DevOps
Challenge: ensuring clarity, consistency, and alignment in user story definition
As UNICRE accelerated its digital transformation, a challenge common to many organizations became increasingly evident: how to translate complex business needs into clear, complete, and technically consistent user stories, without losing context throughout the development lifecycle.
Before adopting StoryWeaver, user story creation was often incomplete and lacked sufficient detail. It also relied heavily on manual effort and knowledge distributed across teams. This approach made the process more prone to ambiguity, missing details, divergent interpretations, and subsequent rework. These initial inaccuracies often resulted in change requests, rework, delays, and a direct impact on the overall quality of deliverables.
At the same time, there was a recurring challenge in aligning business and technology. Different teams operated with distinct languages, expectations, and priorities, making collaboration less fluid, slowing decision-making, and limiting the ability to establish a shared understanding of what needed to be delivered.
Clarity
Difficulty in translating complex business needs into clear and complete user stories.
Consistency
Dependence on manual effort and distributed knowledge, leading to ambiguities and rework.
Alignment
Lack of alignment between business and technology, making collaboration and decision-making more difficult.
Solution: generating structured, complete, and contextualized user stories with GenAI
Xpand IT and UNICRE have built a long-standing partnership, enabling strong strategic alignment from the outset. This proximity was critical to ensuring that the solution addressed not only a technical challenge but also a real, day-to-day pain point for the teams.
StoryWeaver was initially developed as an internal initiative at Xpand IT to solve real challenges faced by its own Delivery teams. However, it quickly became clear that these challenges were not unique. When applied in a demanding and regulated environment such as UNICRE, the solution evolved significantly, becoming more robust, flexible, and adaptable to different organizational contexts.
From the beginning, it was clear that Artificial Intelligence would support execution, not replace human work. All generated user stories are reviewed, refined, and validated by teams, ensuring that control, accountability, and critical thinking remain at the core of the process. The goal is to accelerate delivery while improving the quality of the output.
StoryWeaver leverages Generative AI (GenAI) to automate the creation of structured user stories, acceptance criteria, and related artifacts, driving consistency, clarity, and alignment with business needs and objectives.
A key component of the solution is the use of AI models as a true enabler between teams, translating business requirements into technical language in a fast, structured, and contextualized way. This mechanism reduces ambiguity, accelerates decision-making, and creates a shared understanding across multidisciplinary teams.
The solution integrates with Azure DevOps, supporting agile practices and allowing teams to focus on higher-value tasks such as critical analysis, continuous improvement, and risk anticipation. For UNICRE, this project demonstrated in practice that Artificial Intelligence can be a powerful ally when applied with intention and responsibility.
Beyond accelerating the process itself, StoryWeaver also contributed to greater internal awareness of process maturity and identified clear opportunities for optimization.
The adoption of the solution was supported by a structured change management approach, including the identification of internal champions, continuous communication of value, and active team engagement, critical factors to ensure adoption and sustainable impact.
This project demonstrates how the combination of Artificial Intelligence, agile practices, and a strong partnership can transform the way organizations work. By keeping humans at the center and using automation as an amplifier (not a replacement) of critical thinking, UNICRE was able to make its teams more efficient, collaborative, and focused on delivering real business value.
"Artificial Intelligence did not come to replace human thinking at UNICRE; it came to structure it, making it clearer and more effective. With StoryWeaver, we were able to transform complexity into alignment and accelerate the delivery of business value."
Marisa Martins
Chief Digital Officer, UNICRE
Benefits: increasing efficiency, reducing rework, and improving delivery quality
Increased operational efficiency
reducing by 40% (based on Xpand IT’s experience) the time required to transform ideas into development-ready user stories.
Improved quality and completeness of user stories
ensuring critical requirements are not overlooked.
Reduced change requests after implementation
reflecting greater clarity and alignment from the outset.
Stronger alignment between business and technology
supported by a shared language and more transparent processes.
More time available for strategic tasks
enabling teams to go beyond execution and actively contribute to value creation.
Greater traceability of requirements
ensuring a clear link between business needs, development, and final deliveries.
Technologies
About UNICRE
Headquarters: Lisbon, Portugal
Foundation: 1974
Mission and values
- Connecting people, businesses, and technology to deliver unique payment experiences
- Focus on continuous innovation in the payments sector, with a strong technological DNA
- Commitment to simplicity, security, and improving the customer experience
Type of solution
- Automation of user story creation using GenAI (StoryWeaver)
- Structuring business requirements into clear and consistent technical artifacts
- Integration with agile practices and Azure DevOps to accelerate development and alignment across teams
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