If it’s not your developers, what’s slowing down development? Here’s a hint: it’s your process.

This is the most interesting part to me:

We see the same basic flow to our tickets. A lot of them get stuck in the "Someday" pile and a lot of them get stuck waiting for acceptance.

I also like there idea of using a mad-lib like template to define a story.

Here are some steps you can take to ensure you’re not slowing your team down:

  1. Help your team understand the vision: work with your team to define a vision for how you’re going to make users’ lives better. Be clear about the outcomes your users need. It’s important to have developer buy-in. Their passion for a feature can be a huge driver for velocity.
  2. Write well-defined user stories: use a mad-lib or a template for each task you create. Developers should have the power to say no to a task, until it has a detailed description.
  3. Reduce context switching costs: don’t interrupt your developers! Before sending them an email or making a request, evaluate the cost to their productivity.

https://sprint.ly/blog/your-developers-arent-slow/