Planning Poker

Anyone with the room link can join the room and see the votes. The link is the only thing protecting a session, so treat it like the meeting invitation it is. Rooms are deleted 48 hours after the last thing anybody does in them.

A team needs a sense of how big a piece of work is. Everybody privately picks a card, everybody turns them over at the same moment, and the team talks about the gap between the highest and the lowest before agreeing a number.

The cards run 0, 1, 2, 3, 5, 8, 13, 20, 40, 100 — roughly Fibonacci, so the gaps widen as the numbers grow. That is deliberate. Nobody can tell 21 from 22, and a deck that lets you try wastes the session on precision that does not exist.

The simultaneous reveal is not a flourish, it is the mechanism. Ask a team out loud and the first number spoken becomes the number. The most senior voice, or simply the loudest, sets an anchor, and everybody else adjusts towards it without ever deciding to. That is not a failure of nerve — it is how estimation works when people can hear each other. Hiding the cards until they are all in is what stops it, and it is the only part of the ceremony that cannot be dropped.

Which is why this room does not merely hide the other cards until the reveal. Your card is not sent to anybody else's browser at all. Before the turn, all the room is told about you is that you have voted.

The disagreement is the product. A round where everybody says 5 tells you almost nothing you did not already know. A round where one person says 3 and another says 13 means the two of them are looking at different pieces of work, and the ten minutes that follow are the most valuable ten minutes of the session. The number is a by-product.

Four people out of six said 5, so the temptation is to write down 5 and move on. That would throw away everything the round just bought.

The two numbers worth asking about are Ada's 3 and Eve's 13. Ada is thinking of the form and the token — a day's work, and she is right about the part she is looking at. Eve has done it before somewhere else and is thinking about the expiring link, the email that has to go out, the rate limiting that stops it becoming a way to spam somebody, and the audit entry the security review will ask for. She is also right.

They are not disagreeing about size. They are describing two different pieces of work, and nobody in the room had noticed until the cards came over. The team agreed 8, and split the audit entry into a story of its own.

Note what the tool did not do: it did not write 6.5 down. An average of six opinions is a number nobody in the room actually holds, and accepting it quietly is the exact thing planning poker exists to prevent. The room suggests the most common card, the median and the nearest card on the deck. Somebody still has to say the number out loud.

1. Put your name in, paste your list of stories one per line, and start the room.
2. Share the link. Everyone opens it on whatever they have to hand and types a display name. Up to twenty people, and there is nothing to install.
3. Everyone picks a card. The room shows who has voted and nothing else. The cards turn over by themselves once the last person is in, or you can turn them early if somebody has stepped away.
4. Talk about the highest and the lowest. Then record the number the team agreed and move to the next story.

If the discussion changes somebody's mind, call a re-vote on the same story. Two rounds on one story is a session working properly, not a session going badly.