Planning Poker Guide
A practical guide to running planning poker sessions with hidden voting, clear reveals, custom decks, and lightweight facilitation.
What planning poker is for
Planning poker helps a team estimate work by letting each participant vote independently before the results are revealed. The hidden vote reduces anchoring, and the reveal creates a focused conversation around uncertainty, complexity, and assumptions.
StoryPointLab keeps that workflow intentionally small: create a room, share the link, select a deck, vote, reveal, discuss, and reset for the next story.
A clean session flow
- Add or paste the work item title so everyone is discussing the same story.
- Invite the team with the room link and wait until the expected people are present.
- Ask every participant to vote before revealing the cards.
- Discuss only the spread: the highest and lowest estimates usually contain the useful information.
- Reset the round after the team agrees on a point value.
When custom decks help
Custom cards are useful when a team estimates in T-shirt sizes, uses a modified Fibonacci sequence, or needs non-numeric options such as question mark, coffee break, or split the story.
A good custom deck is small enough to keep decisions moving. If the deck has too many options, estimation becomes a precision exercise instead of a planning conversation.
Facilitation tips
- Do not average estimates automatically; use the disagreement to uncover missing context.
- Split stories that repeatedly receive very high estimates.
- Keep notes outside the poker room if they belong in the backlog item.
- Use the same deck across a team long enough for the numbers to become familiar.