PM Tools – Planning Poker

The role of product manager can vary across companies. Some PM’s are end to end Business & Tech. Some companies have a Tech PM who focusses on delivering a roadmap through working directly with engineers and designers.

As one of a series of PM videos I thought running a “Planning Poker” session might be a useful topic to cover. Planning poker (also called Scrum poker) helps agile teams estimate the time and effort needed to complete each initiative on their product backlog.

I tend to use the Fibonacci sequence including a zero: 0, 1, 2, 3, 5, 8, 13, 21, 34, 55, 89 because its the one most people are familiar with. It’s important to establish with the team what the numbers represent. 1 might be changing some text. A 5 might be a large task that might last the sprint/iteration for one person.

Vertically slicing features really help breaks larger features down to sizeable chunks. In refinement I usually see 1-5 being the weighting. 8-55 tends to be what I’ve seen in a SWAG (Scientific Wild Ass Guess). If you are building a new product from scratch you start with the big chunks then refine from there.

In the video I’m going to show you two things;

  • Basic principles in Planning Poker
  • How I like to import stories so I can work through them with a team

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