Cut Your Sprint Planning Time in Half

Sprint planning has a reputation for being the most exhausting meeting of the entire agile lifecycle. But it absolutely doesn’t have to be.

If your planning sessions drag on for two hours, you are probably doing one of two things wrong: you are either discussing the requirements for the first time during the meeting, or you are arguing over minor point differences.

The True Cost of Arguing Over Points

Let's do some quick math. If you have a team of six developers in a room, that meeting is costing your company hundreds of dollars an hour.

If half the team votes a 3 and the other half votes a 5, and you spend 15 minutes debating which number is "more right," you are burning money. Just pick the 5 and move on. The difference between a 3 and a 5 will almost never be the reason your sprint fails.

Here is how you fix long meetings:

1. Refine before you plan. Tickets should already be understood by the time you sit down to estimate.
2. Focus on the outliers. Only stop to talk when someone votes a 2 and someone else votes a 13. Those are the conversations that actually save sprints.

Finally, stop wasting time setting up complex enterprise software just to vote. Use a frictionless online estimate poker tool. Drop the link in your team chat, click your cards, and get back to writing code.