About Storymate

Built by someone who lived the problem.

After a decade leading engineering teams in regulated enterprise environments, I kept watching the same hours vanish every sprint — not in building, not in planning, but in just getting stories ready to build.

The background

Ten years in enterprise Agile. From the trenches.

I'm Yanick Salzmann — a tech leader and backend architect based in Zürich, Switzerland. Over the past decade I've worked across financial infrastructure, telecommunications, and insurance, spending the majority of that time at SIX — Switzerland's financial market infrastructure provider — where I eventually led a group of 15 engineers in the post-trading domain.

My career started in Agile delivery as a Scrum Master at Swisscom, which gave me a ground-level understanding of what teams actually struggle with during refinement. That perspective never left me, even as I moved into more technical leadership roles.

Across all of those roles — regardless of team size, domain, or seniority level — one pattern repeated itself: sprint planning sessions that bloated because turning a feature description into stories the team could actually commit to is genuinely hard. Not because the teams were slow or underprepared. Because it requires the right context, the right structure, and enough consistency to maintain quality across an entire backlog. That's difficult to sustain by hand.

Career
Refinement didn't fail because teams lacked discipline. It failed because writing good stories consistently — across an entire backlog, sprint after sprint — is a harder problem than anyone admits.
Yanick Salzmann — founder, Storymate
The insight

Validated inside a corporation. Blocked by it too.

A few years into leading engineering teams, I started building a solution inside the organization I was part of. The goal was simple: use AI to handle the heavy lifting of story creation and let teams focus on reviewing and refining rather than drafting from scratch.

The response was strong. Teams immediately grasped the value. The quality improvement was visible. The time savings were real. The problem was clear, and the tool was clearly solving it.

But growing something like that organically inside a large corporation is a different challenge entirely. It requires dedicated time that gets reallocated to delivery priorities, a budget commitment that doesn't fit any obvious line item, and an internal champion with the patience to navigate procurement and adoption across multiple teams. The idea had all the validation it needed. What it didn't have was a path to growth that could survive the natural constraints of corporate processes.

That experience made one thing clear: the only way to build what teams actually needed was to step outside those constraints entirely and create it as a proper product.

What that experience proved The problem is real and recognizable across teams and organizations. The internal enthusiasm was immediate and consistent — story quality improved, refinement overhead dropped, and engineers spent less time debating structure. That feedback shaped every product decision in Storymate.
What changed

Built independently, to actually ship.

The corporate version proved the concept. Storymate is what happens when you remove the organizational constraints and build the same idea properly — as a multi-tenant SaaS that any Agile team can adopt without an internal sponsor, a procurement cycle, or a budget exception.

Solo founder

One person. Every layer.

Storymate is built and maintained entirely by me — backend architecture, frontend, AI pipeline, infrastructure, security, billing, and every integration. No VC funding. No external team. No dependencies on internal tooling decisions.

That constraint is intentional. It keeps the product lean, the decisions fast, and the architecture directly shaped by the experience of someone who has led and built in enterprise environments for over a decade.

Backend Ktor · Kotlin · Hibernate
Frontend Angular 21 · TypeScript
AI pipeline Claude · OpenAI · Azure · Bedrock · Vertex
Infrastructure Google Cloud Run · PostgreSQL
Integrations Jira · ADO · GitHub · GitLab · Confluence · TestRail · Xray · Zephyr

If your team loses sprints to story-writing overhead — this is for you.

Start with a free account. Bring your own context, slice a feature, and see what refinement looks like when the first draft is already done.

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