Yes, this is for plan mode, though hopefully it's a twofer, it would be helpful on work mode too.

It's more like "As Patrick, I'd like to be able to see and change the assignees of tasks in plan mode so I can pre-allocate work to team members for the sprint".

So this is about Plan Mode, and showing assignee avatars on Detail View?

"As Patrick, I would like to see the assignee at a more visible level on each issue, so that I can more effectively plan based on each team member"?

Sure, this is a partial step towards accommodating customers that like to pre-assign stories / tasks to users and check that users are not 'over allocated'.

The first part is to show these avatars which could also potentially be clickable to reassign the stories / tasks (at the moment there is now way to do this for sub tasks). The next part is to put avatars in the Future/Current sprint headers in plan mode and overall header in work mode so that you can see at a glance who's involved in the sprint and can hover the avatar to see how much work they are assigned.

sclowes can you please add some clarity to this story? What is the "As a ..." thing we're trying to solve?