I almost wish that this excellent post from Tyner Blain wasn't titled "Agile Prioritization: Which Widget?" If you left out the word Agile from the title, you'd still have a good cautionary tale about how you prioritize features and capabilities. More importantly, something phrased as a development project ("Build the following widgets...") doesn't necessarily convey what a feature does does, how it provides value, and why the team should build it in the first place.
On the other hand, to give Agile its props, user stories have moved the quality of requirements forward. By their nature, user stories force people to make at least some minimal effort towards explaining how someone will use a piece of technology. Depending on the quality of the user story, plus other supporting references (personas, etc.), the user story can explain rather easily why the technology has value.
Of course, you can write bad user stories, or fail to build the conceptual bridge between the human activity it describes and the technology that might support it. If everything in your backlog (or other requirements content, if you're not using that particular Agile medium) has titles like ERP widget, or even File upload widget, you're probably not building that bridge.
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