Sprint Planning Minus Estimation Efforts

This week Product School Slack's community members uncovered ways to properly plan product sprints. Check it out!

Hi there, is there a way to do the sprint planning without doing the effort estimate for each ticket ? Don't you guys think that effort estimation is very time taking and tedious work ?

One thing to keep in mind is that Story Points are meant to be a measure of complexity, not a measure of effort.

A junior dev and a senior dev will have different levels of effort for the same item. The complexity remains the same.

You can simply stop estimating the complexity. It's useless. At the point in time where an item is in your backlog, and you feel confident that it's been descoped and broken down as small as possible - it doesnt matter what kind of complexity it attracts. If it's the most important thing to drive business impact at that time, you damn well are going to do it.

There has been a growing No Estimates movement for quite a few years now. Do a bit of googling, and feel comfortable in dropping estimation from your rituals. Priortize on impact and if use your gut when planning. If it feels 'too much' in a spint, then don't add so much. If you complete the work committed in the sprint early, simply take the next item in the backlog.

Hi , interesting insight. Can you post a link to the source where story points are meant to be a measure of complexity and not effort?

I have the book User Stories Applied - is it in there?

How are you doing the story point estimate? It’s not meant to be time consuming or tedious

To add to Daniel- it’s complexity, effort, and unknowns (but most people think it’s time)

I once had a data scientist ask me, why the weight of two tasks at 1 and 2 points isn’t equal to that of 3.. interesting think to think on. Time is something we’re all taught so it’s easy to think that quickly.

Thought the purpose of using points is to measure the tasks being handed out so we don’t hand out too much. Ideally we’d get everything done but really it’s to say this is a “big” task cuz it’s complex or there’s a lot we don’t know etc or a small and simple task because we know what we need to do and it’s not a high effort (etc)

Hi Sudeep, Completely agree with Daniel and Mar. So, in my exp. as a Project Manager, I have followed the following:

..Not Sure how to add tables here..

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