Planning Poker has been with us for years, and it works to a certain extent. But it has its drawbacks as well…

What is the Team Estimation Game

The Team Estimation Game is a collaborative, fast-paced estimation technique focused on relative comparison rather than individual voting. Instead of estimating one item at a time, the team works with many backlog items simultaneously.

On the internet, you can find many complex variants of it, yet I’m a big fan of its simplest form.

Keep the Big Picture during estimation

In the Team Estimation Game, the team works on the whole sprint scope and looks at all stories/tasks at the same time, reasoning about them all at once. In Planning Poker, you focus on one story at a time, estimate it, and then forget about it. That’s a meaningful difference.

Preparation

You can play remotely using any online board you like (like Miro/Lucid), or locally with classic sticky notes and a whiteboard or even just on the table.

Draw columns according to your scale

Not to end up with estimation more granular than your current scale, prepare columns upfront. For example, assuming you estimate in story points: 0, 1, 2, 3, 5, 8, 13, 21, draw 8 columns.

List players

You’ll play in turns, so to avoid messing up the move order, prepare a list of players in some accessible place.

Bring stories/tasks

Prepare sticky notes (literally or virtually) with stories/tasks - those will be moved back and forth during the game.

The Game

As a facilitator call players by name, start by calling first person on the list instructing them to move one card. Keep up the pace by calling the next player shortly after the previous person finishes, especially during online collaboration, prone to distraction.

Move one card or pass

Each player moves one card either from the stack to the board or from one board column to another. It’s allowed to move a card in between, moving existing cards to the column on the right or left. When everything already looks good to you, you can pass your turn. Everyone is allowed to do any move they want, explaining the reasoning behind. Others can ask questions, but cannot ‘block’ someone’s move. Obviously at some point when some players disagree, deeper discussion and some compromise is inevitable.

The Results

At the end, when everyone is satisfied with the current state of the board, the game is finished and you have nice estimations focused on references to each other :)

The Matrix

Instead of columns you can prepare two-dimensional matrix, for example with value/effort or risk/effort, to gain deeper understanding of the tasks and maybe give up some less valuable stories or those with bigger risk.

Summary

That’s it — a very simple exercise that brings more precise estimations and deeper understanding (through the discussions that took place) than classic Planning Poker. Obviously, quick Poker sessions still have their place, but when planning a whole sprint, the Team Estimation Game is my go-to approach now.