Killing planning poker meetings with Shared Estimations
Shared Estimations, a new app for estimating agile work, is coming to Jira Cloud!
Your team is busy. Blocking out an hour for an estimation meeting can break everyone's focus. With Shared Estimations, you don't have to. The estimation owner can simply send a link of the work items that need estimations to the team's chat, and say, 'Please vote on this by the end of the day.' Team members can then go through the work items and cast their vote whenever they have a spare moment. There are no distracting notifications from the app itself and no arbitrary deadlines. When the owner is ready, they can simply close the session and see the results.
A quick note about the current landscape
And yes, I know what you’re thinking: there’s already plenty of estimation apps, just like there are plenty of alternatives for most functions and jobs in an agile team, from writing user stories and collecting customer insights to code management, exploratory testing… you name it.
So why exactly do we at Sngular believe there’s place for a new entry in the market?
Because the marketplace has a few of very sophisticated and versatile apps for planning poker and comprehensive estimation meetings… but to be fair, what we hear is that estimation meetings are often wasting everybody’s time, particularly the devs'!
Shared Estimations is a no-config alternative. A minimalistic app that doesn’t require any work upfront. You don’t need to select a project, a team, or a setup.
You don’t have to schedule meetings, set timings, get used to the app’s UI, and work on JQLs.
You just open your work items and start voting on the side panel. It’s that simple.
That’s why the existing Data Center app is being used by dozens of large organizations. Their teams are getting back their time and finding a more convenient and more accurate way to get their story points right!
On top of that, the app comes for a fraction of the cost of the bigger players, meaning that you can afford it even if only a 5%-15% of your teams are likely to use it. But keep reading, and I bet that you’ll find use cases for a larger chunk!
Perfect for remote teams
Whereas most alternatives create a strong gamification experience that can actually be very enjoyable (as long as it takes 15 minutes rather than the 3.5 hours I got used to at one of my former roles), Shared Estimations is great for teams that thrive on async collaboration.
Instead of an invitation to a meeting, devs just get shared a link with the list of work items that need their vote, and until when they have time to vote. The votes can be done at any time independently, respecting everybody’s focus and flow.
If you’re a remote company using Planning Poker apps, you should consider migrating as a major tactic to minimize the amount of distractions and waste!
A stronger approach against bias
Async estimations are also less biased.
All estimation apps are based on the principle that votes have to be cast independently. Voters should not be able to see what others are voting in real time, nor should their vote be anchored by an initial estimation.
Unfortunately, if you’re doing an estimation meeting you’re likely introducing bias and anchoring, because some conversational comments will include them naturally. Remarks like: “let’s see what you guys think of this one, looks like quite a mouthful”, or “this one should be trivial but let’s go through it anyways” are difficult to remove entirely.
When you cast your votes asynchronously, those exchanges just don’t happen. Or they happen once the votes have been collected, if you feel the need to review some items as a group - which is an option that you will always have.
Effort-based versus Confidence-based estimation methods
In spite of its simplicity, Shared Estimations comes in 5 different methods that will likely grow in the future.
Three of them are classic estimation scales: 1-10 (linear), Fibonacci, and T-shirt Sizes. You could do a dissertation just reviewing Medium posts for and against estimation practices and methods, so I’m not going to spend much time here.
We also have a method called Fist to Five. It’s great when a team lead wants to understand the team’s confidence in an estimate or if you want to do Roman Estimation. In this case, you basically want to understand how likely your team thinks it is that you’ll be able to finish something by the end of the week.
And another method inspired in Who Wants to Be a Millionaire with a bit of a more serious name. When using Wisdom of the Crowd, the team votes on 4 predefined values. This method is incredibly useful when you need to narrow down a wide range of possibilities or want to seek diverse perspectives to find consensus.
Our Public Roadmap
It’s fashionable to build in public, and that's something we want to practice at Sngular's Atlassian Apps team. But when the app has a minimalistic offer, it becomes even more important to be open to what you, the users, think should grow, be more nuanced, more versatile, give more options.
Would you like to schedule voting sessions from a JQL? Create new estimation methods? Capture results in a dashboard? These are all logical evolutions of the app, but you are the owners of its fate! So just chime in, try the app and let us know how it can be even more useful!
Author's disclaimer: Due to an issue with my Community profile, the About the Author widget displays wrong information about my employer. Since May 2025 I am working for Sngular, a Platinum Solution Partner and Silver Marketplace Partner with global footprint but originally from Spain.
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Jaime Capitel
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Inbound Marketing | Thought Leadership
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Berlin, Germany
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