New: Sprint Poker Estimation

Parabol was founded with the commitment to help teams find more meaningful ways of working together. Our team began on that journey by building a tool for guided check-in meetings, which we still use week-in week-out to check the pulse of our work together. 

Parabol is most widely known today as a tool for guided sprint retrospective meetings.

But with more and more teams turning to our tool to support their agile practices, we’ve been thinking about where we could help out in other parts of the agile lifecycle. 

Today, we’re excited to be launching Sprint Poker, which adds agile estimation meetings to our offering.

Parabol now connects the dots from the beginning to the end of each sprint cycle. 

With Sprint Poker, remote and hybrid teams can enjoy all the benefits they’ve come to expect from Parabol meetings to make agile estimation meetings more fun, inclusive, and effective.

Sprint Poker is the result of extensive research with agile teams around the world. We learned that doing agile estimation remotely is hard. 

As teams were trying to replicate their offline Planning Poker experiences in their new remote context, things were falling short. 

We learned that teams enjoy the Planning Poker process because it allows them to all get on the same page about the scope of issues and what made them complex or simple.

But in a remote context, teams struggled as they estimated by manually counting fingers held up on a video call or adding estimates into separate sheets of an excel file, all while trying to avoid anchoring each other. 

During our research we wondered how we could make an agile estimation meeting type that lived up to our values at Parabol.

Parabol meetings are built to help teams talk through their experiences openly, so they can remove blockers and start to work together more effectively. Everything from the anonymity feature to icebreakers is there to help teams like yours have a more open dialogue. 

Another thing that’s important to us, as a fully-distributed team, is making remote work work. More than a compromise made due to circumstance, we hope folks will embrace remote work because it lets them do the best work of their lives. To do that, remote tools have to not just be as good as in-office tools, they have to give you superpowers. 

Rather than giving you superpowers, remote agile estimation was falling short for agile teams. So we set out to solve those problems and build a tool that would work with, not against, agile workflows.

Sprint Poker includes features designed to take the pain out of Planning Poker and make it more intuitive. One of our key concerns has been how to make agile estimation meetings flow more smoothly,  take pressure off facilitators, and make them a time for teams to bond and have fun together.

Sprint Poker comes with the following features:

Let’s take a look in detail at some of those features.

The main complaint about existing agile estimation tools was that they disrupted workflows. Teams were hopping in and out of tools, copying and pasting content.

We’ve designed Sprint Poker to seamlessly integrate with your Jira workflow to save you time and effort. 

Sprint Poker lets you pull in stories directly from Jira, estimate them, and sync those estimates back – all within your Parabol meeting. When you start a Sprint Poker meeting, you can pull in your Jira stories and their descriptions directly from Parabol. The imported stories then form a tidy agenda within the tool. 

Once you’ve decided the final estimate for a story, you can select which field in Jira to post it to. With Sprint Poker you can record estimates to whichever field you like.

Simply set the value and it will be sent to Jira immediately. 

How estimates in Parabol sync directly to Jira

Even if you need to change your final estimate in Parabol, the new estimate will be updated in Jira.

We heard that Planning Poker users loved the idea of having a deck of cards to play with. It adds an element of fun and makes the whole process more tactile.

So we created an interactive deck of cards for you to play with and a few other things too:

Each deck is customized according to the estimation scale you choose. And each deck comes with a question and a pass card built-in. 

Only you can see the card you’ve chosen until the facilitator reveals everyone’s estimates. 

For retrospectives, we consistently hear from users that they really appreciate our templates. Parabol’s retrospective tool comes with a set of pre-built templates, and also allows you to customize templates or create your own.

Just like with retrospectives, you can share custom templates with your team, organization, or the world! 

Sprint Poker comes with two estimation methods and three scales built-in to help your team get on the same page about work:

Can’t find the scale you’re looking for? 

Create your own and share it with your team or organization. 

So if you’re more into fruits, dogs, or plants – no need to worry. You can create a custom scale that suits your team’s unique culture. Sometimes there’s no two ways about it – a user story is just… mango-sized. 

It wouldn’t be a Parabol meeting without: 

All these great features that are available in our Retrospective and Check-in meetings are now available in Sprint Poker too! 

If you’re already a Parabol customer, Sprint Poker is available at no extra cost within your existing plan

So if you’re not a Parabol user yet, come join the party!

Sign-up today and benefit from better Check-In, Retrospective, and Sprint Poker meetings – totally free for up to two teams. 

Simply select Sprint Poker from the meeting carousel in the lobby and get stuck in.

Happy estimating!