> An upload button alone is no user story, a story might be "As a user, I want to be able to import the Excel reports that I get from company $XY, so that I don't have to manually enter the data, and save a lot of time that way", ideally including a reason why that data needs to be there.

The implementation of this functionality in a way that will delight customers could hypothetically take 3 weeks as it requires the implementation of an upload button, a datastore to store the uploaded values, and an integration into a legacy feeds system to get the spreadsheet's data to all of the places it needs to go.

In most scrum processes 3 weeks of effort would not be accepted, and the story would be "broken down" into smaller issues such as "implement an upload button". Even worse scrum projects emphasize anti-patterns of "parallelizing" efforts, so we'll assign each of those smaller stories to separate individuals. While theoretically a customer focused engineer could look at the original user story, there is minimal incentive to do this - and most engineers will focus on pushing stories across the board, the upload button may or may not ever work in a way that customer's desired - and any attempt to fix it requires restarting the whole process.

Yes, but a good scrum process goes like this:

1) the PO presents the story

2) the developers discuss it, and find that it doesn't fit into a single sprint

3) developers and PO together break it down into small issues, for example by turn the original story into an epic, and creating more, smaller issues in that epic.

So when a developer works on the smaller story, they have heard about the context before, and have a link to the epic with the broader context in case they have forgotten.

It's not automatically provided by Jira, but if you use the tools correctly, you can absolutely provide that context.

The article may have a clickbait headline, but „have an overview and use JIRA in addition to track the leafs of the work hierarchy“ is true.

What I found is that almost all projects try to organize as tree but they should organize as matrix, at least if there are many cross-cutting components.

https://agileforall.com/resources/how-to-split-a-user-story/

The first is “make the change/feature easy, then make the easy change/feature”. I call this Structure-Driven Development (SDD), because the features of the software are emergent properties of the structure of the system. This often concerns various “layers” of the system (HTTP, auth, validation, data access, error-handling, etc).

The second is “make the change that’s currently easiest”. I call this Feature-Driven Development (FDD), because the structure of the app is whatever emerges from feature development. This, naturally, concerns the various features of the software itself, spread across whatever primitive components are already available and usually copying structure from the first few features written.

IMO, successful agile product development involves a mix of these styles. SDD produces better structure at the expense of heavy up-front development costs. FDD helps you figure out where to apply SDD.

I like to start projects with SDD for the first few weeks of a project, then alternating styles every 2 weeks to test and refine structural assumptions (think of it like a REPL for architecture). This also helps keep teams from getting too stuck in either style as many do.

Get locked into SDD, end up not shipping a single feature for weeks. Especially prone to happening on single-developer projects. Especially unlikely with good project management + strong communication between engineers and stakeholders.

Get locked into FDD, code yourself into corners, gradually building a pile of mud that no-one fully understands. Far less likely (but still possible) on single-developer projects. Senior engineering oversight and adequate time budgeting are critical to preventing this.

Both styles have their tradeoffs, and like most things it takes experience/maturity and a dash of luck to navigate the balance successfully on a given project.

One indicator that your SDD is working is that you do much less of it after the first month or two of development, as the structure will be in place and effort can largely shift to features and polish.

EDIT: Cleaned this up into a post here https://medium.com/@hi_17592/software-development-styles-ebe...

that's not true. an experienced developer will actually structure the project in a good way, even if the problem is split into multiple issues.

If a person repeated the same project 5 times on the last attempt would require very little trying to find the proper structure. Experience has everything to do with that.

After a number of iterations of this, you converge on a baseline architecture that you try to support future change without being excessively focused on YAGNI. Over-focus on YAGNI often leads to architectures that are so inflexible that when you DO need it, you can't add it without a demolition crew[1].

People should also remember the context in which YAGNI came up: Kent Beck, Ward Cunningham, Smalltalk, and the C3 project. This particular combination of people, project, and process made YAGNI feasible. And the C3 project, which spawned XP, was not as successful as folklore would have it[2].

It's not always so. Imagine if YAGNI was the focus of Roy Fielding and the HTTP specification, which has lasted remarkably well because of allowance for future change in the architecture.

Scrum and other processes that claim adherence to the Agile Manifesto work best in certain contexts, where code turnaround can be fast, mistakes do not take the company down and fixes can be redeployed quickly and easily, the requirements are not well-understood and change rapidly, and the architecture is not overly complex.

Many other projects don't fit this model, and people seem to think that so-called "Agile" (which even the creators of the Manifesto complain is not a noun), and mostly Scrum, is the sole exemplar of productivity.

The fact is that there are many hybrid development processes, described by Steve McConnell[3] long before the word "agile" became a synonym for "success", that may be more suitable to projects that have different dynamics.

An example of such a project could be one that does have well-defined requirements (e.g. implementing something based on an international standard) and will suffer from a pure "User Story" approach.

Let's be much more flexible about how we decide to develop, and accept that you need to tailor the approach to the nature of the project, based on risk factors, longevity, and other factors, and not on dogma.

And let's not underplay the extreme importance of a well-thought out architecture in all but the most trivial of projects.

[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/You_aren%27t_gonna_need_it

[2]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chrysler_Comprehensive_Compens...

[3]: https://www.amazon.com/Rapid-Development-Taming-Software-Sch...

We've just spent a year interviewing 200+ product owners about the problem that the article are describing. For most teams, JIRA works great for monitoring progress on closely defined tasks, but context "above story level" is a real problem. The better teams do already use another tool than JIRA to write such documents, typically at "epic level", and typically using Google Docs and/or Confluence.

But almost all struggle with writing this document, where common problems include: * duplication of work and manual updating between the document and JIRA * unclear handover of the source of truth, since things that are written in the document are "true until stated otherwise in JIRA or a JIRA comment.. or somewhere on Slack" * lots on input/questions/decisions from refinement meetings not captured in either the document or in JIRA

I think the solution is to think of this document less as a "requirements document" (many label this doc a "PRD"), and more as a "refinement document". This "refinement document" should * try to capture the conversation that happens in refinement meetings * involve also the developers to cover not only "why" and "what", but also a bit of "how" * evolve and be updated all the way through development as new insights are gained * be the source of truth and available to the developer working on the JIRA issue

We have made a tool specifically to support working this way with "refinement documents". One dedicated place to refine features. Structure, collaborate, keep track of questions and capture not only decisions, but also conversations. Seamlessy transform your work into crystal clear Jira epics and stories. When you turn notes into Jira issues, you can see all the details via our Jira plugin. Happy to hear your thoughts, please do check it out at https://www.delibr.com/

I'm used to use Jira only for timesheet purposes: hierarchical decomposition (project X, activity Y, often also employee Z) allows stress-free accurate accounting.

There is often so much wasted effort in parallelizing work.

I just implemented a feature that was two months worth of work by myself. I loved being able to think holistically and make changes up and down the stack from the interface (Api calls) to the Devops.

I could make breaking changes between every part of the process and not have to work with five other people. I could easily see “war rooming” it with one other developer though and breaking it down between the two of us where we could just discuss the breaking change and make changes.

Then all four developers would have had to coordinate with the Devops guy.

This is all getting into “Mythical Man Month” territory.

Instead of me trying to explain it, I might as well crib the explanation from Wikipedia.

Complex programming projects cannot be perfectly partitioned into discrete tasks that can be worked on without communication between the workers and without establishing a set of complex interrelationships between tasks and the workers performing them.

Four equally qualified people should be able to deliver more features in the same amount of time working independently than four people working together.

"This rough implementation is how I (we) envision this feature working. What do you think?"

"We've got the feature working well but it requires non-trivial back end changes. Would you be willing to wait or will you be satisfied if it works but only in a very manual way until we get the back end changes in place?"

Week 2 after release: "The feature is live... What do you think? How is it working?"

These are conversations the developers should be having with the end users. Regularly! It's when developers only ever talk to their boss and/or the project manager that pushes development into the anti-user zone.

https://www.railinc.com/rportal/documents/18/260641/Guidefor...

The software for it has to work. There will be months of work implementing the rules engine before you have anything to show the customer besides a mock-up..

You won’t really need two week sprints to get feedback from customers. It either implements all of the rules or it doesn’t. I can imagine the same happening for tax software.

If a customer isn't committed to the project, then I'd worry about committing to it as well. Even if the contract guaranteed I'll get paid, there are few things as demoralising as a project falling over because, once push came to shove, the customer didn't even have the manpower to deploy your product. Those are usually the same people who would do the evaluation, so with my experience, as an employee, if they're not there, I'm going to look for a project where they are — regardless of how confident sales might be.

Well, by definition, a feature that takes 2 months to build takes 2 months to build. Shipping part of the feature early doesn't provide feedback for the finished product. It provides feedback for the incomplete feature. How valuable is that feature?

In addition to that,a feature that takes 2 months to build will take longer if you are releasing multiple sub versions. You have to account for actually making it production ready, and releasing it, and handling errors and feedback.

This is why experience matter. Was your feeling of control and happiness worth shipping half-finished, substandard product to your customers?

Other work can be assigned so in two months the customer gets the entire website. If they did it the other way every two weeks something would be finished but at the end they need to rewrite the backend adding an addional months because they didn't have the chance to look ahead and see that module 1 and 2 can't run at the same time.

It took me longer to tune performance than to write the code. Can you imagine four developers working together tweaking code, queries, indexes, number of simultaneous threads, etc?

When I was a team lead, I made it part of the “definition of done” that you had to have documentation and knowledge sharing. Now, I still have both an overview of my proposed architecture before I start just to make sure I didn’t miss anything, Visio diagrams,Powerpoint slides, wiki documentation, an “architecture review”, etc. I hold myself to the same standards I held anyone on the team to.

From a career development standpoint, software developers are a dime a dozen. It’s the people who know how to communicate effectively are the ones that get ahead.

I'm not sure about "agile." In my experience, "agile" means "we have no workflow and it's a fucking madhouse."

   > In most scrum processes 3 weeks of effort would 
   > not be accepted, and the story would be "broken down"
   > into smaller issues such as "implement an upload 
   > button".

At some point, this will need to happen.

One of the primary values of Scrum is that it forces you to break a story down into discrete tasks and estimate them as a team before the work begins.

This is a great chance to pool your knowledge as a team. Suppose a team consists of developers A, B, C, D, and E.

Well, implementing the Excel imports might involve 3 smaller stories. The first story might involve concerns that A and E have, and maybe there's actually a really easy way to do it that C knows about because she's done it before, and D's done it before too and knows about some pitfalls. That's a friggin great conversation to have.

Now, you don't need Scrum to have that conversation, but Scrum's cool because it makes it nearly impossible to avoid it. Now, naturally, you certainly don't need Scrum to have that conversation! A healthy team of high achievers with great communication skills would have it anyway! But, the reality is... that conversation often doesn't happen without some kind of process (Scrum, or whatever) to make sure it happens.

    > Even worse scrum projects emphasize anti-patterns of "parallelizing" efforts

Not familiar with Jira, but we used Pivotal Tracker and it lets you specify which stories are blocking other stories.

So what you end up with are several 'stories' that are basically collections of tasks from the actual story. Each of those 'stories' barely make sense on their own and it makes about as much sense to delay the last 'story' and use the intermediate result as it would be to delay the installation of the engine into a car.

> In most scrum processes 3 weeks of effort would not be accepted, and the story would be "broken down" into smaller issues such as "implement an upload button".

You can always find some way to implement something valuable to the user in less than 2 weeks if you actually try. Don't give them an upload button that doesn't go anywhere: give them an end-to-end integration that only works for one of the reports. Give them a network path where they have to save the sheet with a hardcoded filename, if that's still going to save a lot of time compared to manual data entry. Build end-to-end paths that you can widen out, not vertical slices that are useless until you've done all of them.

Maybe as the replies suggest, it gets dev-done in less than a week despite the longer estimates, and if you're lucky QE picks it up and closes it before the end of the next week. The usual outcome for these types of stories is that one or the other takes longer, or the sprint was packed with too many 2-3 day bits of work that kept getting prioritized over QEing the big one, and now you have bleed-over as you push it to the next sprint (along with any 2-3 day stuff that you started on Friday because you were free). Bleed-over is the normal way you get > 2 weeks of work stories done, and is also a consequence of smaller things not perfectly fitting into the two week period as well.

My team had these problems with the scrum process and switched over to a kanban style a couple years ago, it's been better for everyone. Because of the concept of WIP limits at each major stage in the pipeline, we get parallelism where it matters -- i.e. people unclogging the pipe: if the WIP limit is reached for dev-in-progress work and someone is looking for new work, it has to be something later in the pipeline. Because we don't do things in chunks of 2-weeks, if something takes longer than 2 weeks to get through the complete pipeline, no biggy, some work is just optimally sized for one person to spend a few weeks on to do the best job. (But that ended up happening less because of the WIP limits helping to force us to get things through instead of sitting around in one state forever.) And if you want to start something new on a Friday, no biggy, we don't have to argue over bleed-over and trying to optimize the bucket of new things per sprint for the next sprint with the other rule of not bringing in new things. (Sprint models are so obviously defective when you've finished up everything in the sprint on a Thursday morning. What are you going to do for the next day and a half if you have the rule that you can only add stuff to the board during sprint planning? Well the answer some shops give is you add something anyway, and it immediately bleeds over, and then you get criticized for bleed-over.)

You could also say to switch up what scrum means if you're having trouble -- to be honest I've never considered the idea of just ending the sprint early (and rescheduling the sprint planning meeting!), I'm skeptical than any of the "Certified Scrum Masters" I know have either... But it still can't be done if you are finished early but the rest of the team isn't. My team didn't really have a problem with taking on work assigned to someone else so long as that work wasn't started yet, but things get tricky when all the work assigned has been started by someone. A solution in that case does present itself besides just bringing in something new, it's the same solution as kanban when the buckets are full: join another developer on their story and pair (doesn't have to be "formal" pairing even) to get it done faster.

But you've highlighted another problem with the whole mess, that being ownership accountability. Lack of visibility outside of the standup meeting into what Dev B is working on when they're paring with Dev A (who is the sole "assigned dev" in the tracking system) is an obstacle to incentivizing pairing. Sometimes you need that visibility. On an old team I left because of terrible management, there were just two of us devs at one point. One sprint it turned out that my face was on the dev column for almost all the items, the sprint before it was my coworker's face, in reality we paired on almost everything. But that second week my manager (who never joined our standups) asked "What are your thoughts about Dev A's work performance? You seem to be doing everything right now." Management memory was sprint-to-sprint. This isn't a problem with scrum, of course, though it does enable that problem to surface where at least in a kanban style you'd have the giant column of closed things having a mix of faces.

What I have seen mostly, is that the devs finish early (about 1/2 or 3/4 into the sprint), and wait for QA. And so, QA is idle at the start of the sprint. Bleed-over was then just accepted and incorporated, while I was not sure of the usefulness of "sprints" anymore.

IMHO, Scrum is a tool bring an agile development process to a classical project organization. The idea behind Scrum is to build your own 'bubble' (the development team) where you can use an agile approach while assigning people who are meant to manage the interactions with the rest of the organization (Scrum Masters).

So in the end, Scrum is some kind of practical approach to bringing agile development practices to large organizations and obviously, that is a compromise. So there is no contradiction, it is just that Scrum is not the solution, but a (first stage) tool to change existing organizations to become the agile organizations we would like to work within.

Sadly many companies think they are 'Agile' once they adopted Scrum, but often they embraced the 'Processes and Tools' while agile clearly states that 'Individuals and interactions' are the relevant part:

http://agilemanifesto.org

Ah, and then there are the projects where Jira items are mapped into SAP items for project accounting, which introduce yet another "not so fun" discussion about when projects activities are supposed to be paid.

1. Create epic with full context. 2. Create sub stories or tasks that describe the smaller deliverables. 3. Boom. Small tasks with a direct link to larger context.

Works 100% fine in Jira and has since the early days.

Design team makes a mock that is styled and placed correctly, including moving around exiting elements in the page.

> a datastore to store the uploaded values

Just 1 datastore? More like:

+ a frontend service to get/put and validate the data is in the right format with sizing

+ a backend storage service (hardened because we don't know what's in the document) for get/put with sizing and validation

optionally - an integration into a legacy feeds system to get the spreadsheet's data to all of the places it needs to go

Ensure Legal, ADA, FDA, whatever compliant.

Document EVERY decision along the way and coordinate.

3 weeks looks a little hight to me, but things tend to go awry with so many moving parts.

Ah yes, nothing is better than questioning the estimate of a hypothetical user story that lacks any and all detail about the existing environment.

Like, maybe 3 weeks is quick? Maybe there is all kinds of shit you didn't even think of at all? Maybe the excel sheet has all kinds of weird non-canonical data that makes it very hard to reliably import? Maybe nobody on the team ever touched an excel spreadsheet in their life, let alone imported one?

Like.... seriously. Are you one of those people who always go "you people are idiots, I can do task XYZ in 1/3 of the time all you estimated"?

When an engineer tells you something will take 3 weeks, you listen to them.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18608294

It needs half a terabyte of RAM to open.

I would still love it if user stories were implemented as the "why" (or even "what") instead of "how", though.

    Jira was designed for agile software development 
    like Scrum, so you should write user stories, not 
    mini specifications.

I was at a company that did Scrum. There were two managers who functioned as product owners on the scrum teams.

Manager A took the correct approach. Developers were aware of the overall goal, and we broke those goals down into stories, and broke the stories down into tasks. As developers we had a good sense of ownership and responsibility.

Manager B tended to just issue stories (which were really mini specs) to us. We were treated like children. We didn't know why we were doing what we were doing, and were not able to contribute to the design of the solutions we were handed, which were often suboptimal.

A lot of teams take "Manager B's" approach and wonder why the developers hate Scrum.

But...the other 4 times I get either no solution, or the Upload button only works as long as one user at a time tries it, or only on Chrome when all customers use IE8, or the documents randomly disappear when new dockers spin up, or the button needed to be WCAG compliant and no one bothered checking, etc. Suddenly I am forced to be Manager B and no one is happy. The feature is 3x over budget and 3 weeks late.

What leading indicators can we use to predict or at least alert to a failing Manager A project early in the cycle so I can do what I love, devs can do what they love, biz stakeholders get things on time and on budget, and customers can get something they love?

Whatever's going on, you gotta catch it sooner, right? Any way the stories can be smaller and get out to QA sooner?

Maybe you could try being "Manager AB"

Instead of a totally hands-off "Manager A" style maybe you can work more closely with them to develop those stories and make sure they understand what technical requirements (WCAG compliance, etc) each story needs to hit before they estimate them

But experts are fallible, and distractions are many, and sometimes even experts get lazy or confused or overwhelmed.

This is my main issue with the OP; if you're using Jira for tasks like "Implement the upload button" then of course your developers are going to lack context about the broader vision/roadmap. That sort of division of labor encourages "widget factory" thinking. This is not a problem with Jira, it's a problem with the underlying product planning process.

I'm sure plenty of companies have "scrum masters", create Jira tickets called "stories", and think they are "doing Agile", while using a process like that. But that's seems like cargo-cult agile software development to me.

I do agree with the narrower critique that it's hard to present a broader roadmap with Jira; I've found Portfolio to be only OK for managing sequencing of Jira epics without getting bogged down in the details of individual stories.

E.g. "As a user, I want to be able to import the Excel reports that I get from company $XY, so that I don't have to manually enter the data, and save a lot of time that way" can transform into "As a user, I want data from $XY company in my system with minimal effort" during grooming or planning, but rarely during development (it is also possible, but it will break all your sprint commitments, and possibly other teams' commitments as well).

Now, regarding the broader context. It depends on the project – the larger it is, the harder it is to share it. In a small project it is very simple to describe in user story why is it needed, what is the end goal, and link to some epic. In the large projects, however, it is much more tricky, and while their example is a little bit too much, but sometimes it will literally hurt the project to share too much (not from security perspective, just from the amount of information). Sometimes there is too much info, and only PM/PO/BA know enough to judge, and sometimes such story is too big, and you end up with it being an epic, and "Implement a button" is a user story.

JIRA might work, and it works pretty well for many companies. From my experience, it is the best for middle sized companies – too much overhead for small companies, not detailed enough for too big companies.

This is a more general user story than I've seen when I've worked in agile developments. Usually, the stories are quite specific, like "As a user, I can click an Upload button to provide an Excel report."

Alternative view: when agile software development features finally turned up for Jira, they still took a while to graduate from paid plugin (Greenhopper) to core features.

To me "designed for" always felt like "tacked on", and that they were somewhat fighting existing legacy object models.

JIRA has been around over 15 years and definitely supported other workflows before it supported Agile ones specifically.

To me, it has felt in need of a complete rewrite for probably half of that time.

If you've had to do administration for it, or have had to dive into more complex configurations, it definitely feels like it's more baggage than product.

Implicit in this is the assumption that you're not scared of redoing the internals or redesigning the UI as you add features.

It's not about changing the interface frequently. It's about changing it poorly.

But as churn gets more expensive (and this is sometimes inevitable), you want to try harder to avoid it. A process is only agile while revisions are cheap.

It seems like a lot of arguments could be avoided if it were more widely understood that this is a trade-off, with agility on one end and stability on the other, and stability is often good. Particularly when a lot of people depend on you.

"Unless you're scared of a little moving fast and breaking things."

It's a common pattern. When a software system becomes complicated and fragile, it's quite common for the developers to get scared of breakage and move slowly.

Sometimes there are fundamental reasons for moving cautiously, and sometimes they're accidental reasons that could be fixed with a better process (such as better tests). Either way, just being more reckless isn't going to help.

So if you had in mind a generic upload UI where it would look weird with only one choice in the menu, then better to skip the menu entirely for now. It makes the UI worse, and implementing the menu is more work. Plus you don't want to end up with dead code lying around if plans change, since that could confuse someone later.

But if none of those considerations apply and the generic version is actually easier to implement and the UI is just as good, sure it's fine.

Sounds like a process problem and communication breakdown, not a JIRA issue. We use JIRA and it isn't like that at all.

I think that practically this often ends up being "As a user, I would like to have an upload button", Of course, adding "As a user" to the beginning of a sentence does not a user story make.

it says it was created in 2002

That said, I remember using Jira before it had any understanding of an agile workflow, because part of my job was creating one in it.

A finished product can be sold ethically, a prototype cannot.

People are going to say the user story you listed is _way_ too vague, general, or otherwise "not right" or "something they've never seen." They're going to reject it/pick it apart for a litany of reasons, all of which triangulated against their individual experiences. Me too! Here goes:

I've found "user stories" miss entire dimensions of context from the business side which are incredibly important to developers. In lesser-performing orgs, this is often a way the "business folks" (and yes - in some orgs, there is a distinct divide) wield information asymmetry to pawn off blame onto devs when "things aren't right." This information about how people are really gonna use the software vanishes somewhere along the way before it turns into a user story. This post gets at the heart of it pretty well: https://jtbd.info/replacing-the-user-story-with-the-job-stor... (which, btw, if this makes sense to you, is something you're strangely passionate about, and you're not familiar with "jobs to be done" then go get intercom's free ebook on it right now)

I have another guess. This is less of a prediction, more of a thing I'd like to find out: of all the people who reject your user story, how many of them have worked at places where their product manager isn't a technical person?

My guess is: most of them. I'm also guessing PM's get super specific because developers moan at them over minutiae, info gets cut out/they don't realize it's important, and there you go.

I'm betting most orgs adopt agile as a means of combating poor engineering dept performance, and generally (not all the time - but generally) this is directly due to the people managing the technical people not knowing what they're doing, so it's essentially a set of default behaviors that protect both sides and guarantees some minimum (read: not maximum) of performance. So these product managers who don't understand any development are put in charge of developers consider writing tickets their job, and instead of understanding reality -> reflecting that in tickets, they write their tickets and try to coerce reality to follow.

Frankly, take a bunch of people who already didn't want to change their process, force them to hear "you should update your process that's how things are supposed to be" every day, and after a couple months they actually start to do it.

Ticket shaping is super hard. I don't trust a non-technical PM to do it right, unless they happen to be experienced and/or have devs alongside them who are essentially just doing their job for them. Add onto this the fact that typically management consider all parts of software development a linear process.

Not to say you can't have PM's who are nontechnical, and can bring all the right context/organize everyone in the right ways. I believe they exist, I just haven't worked with any. Devs are generally ineffective at communicating technical context in non-technical ways, and reality is an emergent mix of both business & technical.

this has turned rambly. tl;dr - user stories are such a vague/overloaded concept for so many reasons, if you have the choice read up on "job stories" and try and switch to those. They're no less confusing to implement, but they force you to find answers to much better questions.

None of this "button here" "wire it up later" "now add the db table" etc.

Complex tasks are incredibly hard to finish as a single ticket – with such granularity you might have opaque progress for couple days, and you hide a lot of details from everyone.

Unless you mean "tickets" as "user stories", they can be (although not always) treated like that.

Yeah - entirely depends on your subdivision vernacular. Some people make subtasks in a ticket, some people make tickets linked to other tickets, some people do both and link those to "features" which are themselves tickets (like the environment I work in).

Just depends!

It is very hard. At my last gig, we got to a generally good state where the PMs were responsible for periodically outlining their overall "vision" to the team, which captured what we're building and why we're building it. In stories, PMs were made to be very focused on focusing on "what", not "how", and to provide the context for "why". That let the PMs stay out of technical details and let the Engineers use their brains to fill in gaps.

It took some pain and effort to get to that point, but once we got there, it worked very well.