Use it

Planning Poker

Everyone sizes the work at the same moment, on their own phone, without seeing anybody else's card first. Then the room talks about why the highest and the lowest are so far apart — which is the part that is actually worth the meeting.

Facilitating

About ninety seconds of setup

Put your name in and open the room. It takes one field, because the setting up happens in the next step rather than before anybody can see it.
Share the link. Everyone opens it on whatever they have to hand and types a display name, and says whether they are estimating or just watching. Up to twenty people either way, and there is nothing to install.
While they arrive, pick the deck and paste your list of stories one per line. Then start the session, which opens the first story and deals everybody a hand.
Everyone picks a card. Your screen becomes the table — a place for everybody in the room, and a card face down at their place when they vote. The cards turn over by themselves once the last person is in, or you can turn them early if somebody has stepped away.
Talk about the highest and the lowest. Then record the number the team agreed and move to the next story.

Share your screen if you can. The table is drawn for the person running the room rather than for the people voting — everyone else is looking at their own hand on a phone — and it is the one screen where the whole room can watch the cards land and go over together. It makes a quiet noise as they do, which is off in one press if you would rather it did not.

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.

The optional countdown

Estimation conversations drift. If it helps, the facilitator can put a clock on a story and start it when the discussion starts:

30 seconds
60 seconds
90 seconds
2 minutes

Everyone in the room sees the same clock, and somebody who joins halfway through is told what is actually left rather than starting again from the top. It runs, and then it is over:

Time left 0:42

Time is up 1:07 over

And that is all it does. It does not turn the cards over, it does not close the voting and it does not move the room on. It goes overdue, says how far over, and leaves the decision where it belongs. A clock that forced a reveal would turn a conversation into a race, and a room that is rushed produces worse estimates — which is the opposite of what anybody started the timer for. Going two minutes over on a story nobody understands yet is the session doing its job.

Who holds a card

Everybody who joins is estimating. There is no way to arrive as an audience and no way to be moved out of the voting afterwards: if you opened the link, you came to size the work.

The facilitator is the exception, and it is not a choice. You run the room rather than sizing the work — reading each story out, watching the table and deciding when to turn the cards over. You hold no card, nobody is waiting on one from you, and nothing you do moves the mean, the median or the range. That is deliberate: the person running the room putting a number down is the loudest voice in it anchoring everybody else, which is the exact thing this game exists to prevent.

—

Adafacilitator
Brian

voted
Chi

thinking

The role is a word, not a shade. Ada's seat is marked by the label after the name, which a screen reader reads out like any other text. The empty dashed card and the quieter lettering agree with it; they are not what carries it. And that seat says nothing where the others say “thinking” — because nothing is owed, and a room that told you Ada was still thinking would be making exactly the mistake this arrangement exists to prevent.

A room nobody has joined yet does not sit one card short of a reveal that is never coming. It says nobody in it is estimating, which is the true thing and the fixable one.

Credit and licence

Original work — no licence set yet

The room is mine. The technique is not.

Planning poker was described by James Grenning in 2002 and popularised by Mike Cohn, and Wideband Delphi is older than either. None of that is anybody's to license, and this is not adapted from a particular implementation of it — the room, the four decks as they are laid out here, the countdown and the observer seat were all built for this site.

There is no licence on it yet. Estimate with your own team as often as you like; the link is the only thing you need. If you want to do more than that with it, ask.