Why Smart Teams Are Converting Story Points to Hours (And How to Do It Right)

[#1]

Your CFO wants hours. Your devs want story points. Here's how to give everyone what they need without breaking your agile workflow.

If you're running Jira and managing agile teams, you've hit this wall: Story points are perfect for dev estimation, but completely useless when your boss asks "How long will this actually take?"

The disconnect is real. Your engineering team loves the relative simplicity of story points during sprint planning, while project managers are stuck translating "8 points" into something finance can understand. It's like speaking different languages in the same meeting.

But you don't have to choose sides.

Why Story Points Won the Developer Hearts

Story points work because they're honest about uncertainty. When your team assigns 8 points to a user story, they're not saying "this takes exactly 32 hours." They're saying "this is roughly twice as complex as that 4-point story we did last week."

It's brilliant, actually. Story points factor in technical debt, unclear requirements, and the reality that some developers crush certain tasks while others excel elsewhere. Planning poker sessions become collaborative problem-solving rather than time-tracking exercises.

The Fibonacci sequence (1, 2, 3, 5, 8, 13...) that most teams use acknowledges a fundamental truth: bigger stories get exponentially harder to estimate. A 13-point epic isn't just 13 times harder than a 1-point bug fix – it's usually way more complex.

The Enterprise Reality Check

But then reality hits. Your startup scales. Enterprise clients start asking for delivery dates. The board wants resource planning. Suddenly, "it'll be ready when it's ready" doesn't fly anymore.

Project managers need answers to hard questions:

• Which developers have bandwidth next sprint?
• Are we hitting our Q4 commitments?
• Should we hire more frontend devs or backend specialists?

Here's where it gets messy: Different teams define story points differently. One team's 5-point story is another team's 20-pointer. When developers work across multiple squads, this creates chaos for capacity planning.

Wit ActivityTimeline, hours become the universal language – the one metric that works across teams, time zones, and organizational charts.

The Conversion Math That Actually Works

Most successful Jira teams land on a simple formula: Look at your team's velocity over the past few sprints, compare it to actual hours logged, and find your ratio.

Example: Your 4-person team completes 40 story points per 2-week sprint, working roughly 320 hours total (40 hours each). That's 8 hours per story point – your baseline conversion factor.

But don't just multiply and call it done. High-point stories often need disproportionately more time due to coordination overhead, research phases, and integration complexity. A 13-point epic might need 120+ hours, not just 104.

The Technical Setup (Because Implementation Matters)

Jira integrations like ActivityTimeline let you configure conversion factors at two levels:

• Global conversion: Set one ratio across all projects. Perfect for consistent team structures. The setup is straightforward: Configuration → General → Define the conversion rate.

• Project-specific conversion: Different ratios for different types of work. Your mobile app might convert differently than your API backend. Go project-specific: Configuration → Projects → Manage → Define the conversion rate.

Implementation Without the Drama

The biggest mistake? Treating this like a surveillance system. Your developers will revolt if they think you're micromanaging every task.

Instead, position it as translation layer: "We're not changing how you estimate. We're just helping the business understand what your estimates mean in terms they can use for planning."

Key principles:

• Keep using story points for all dev estimation
• Don't break stories into hourly tasks
• Update your conversion factor quarterly based on actual delivery
• Focus on trends, not individual accuracy

Making Both Sides Happy

When done right, this bridges two worlds without sacrificing either. Your burndown charts can show both story points for the dev team and remaining hours for stakeholders. Sprint planning considers both story complexity and actual team capacity.

The product owner gets clearer delivery predictions. Engineering keeps their collaborative estimation process. Finance gets the time-based metrics they need for budgeting.

It's not about perfect accuracy – it's about providing useful information while preserving agile flexibility.

The Bottom Line

Story points aren't going anywhere, and they shouldn't. They're still the best way for development teams to estimate relative effort and plan sprints. But in a world where engineering needs to interface with business operations, translation becomes essential.

Converting story points to hours isn't abandoning agile principles – it's adapting them for organizational reality. The teams doing this well aren't choosing between agile estimation and business planning. They're doing both.

Your developers get to keep their story points. Your CFO gets their hours. Your product ships on time.

Everyone wins.

Ready to bridge the gap?

Most teams need 2-3 sprints to dial in their conversion ratio. Start with your historical velocity, set a baseline conversion, and adjust based on actual delivery. The key is consistency, not perfection. Schedule a demo with ActivityTimeline customer success team to learn what other benefits it can deliver to your team.

[__ Jimi Wikman]

First off, great article and well written.

Secondly, the only difference between a timed estimate and a story point estimate is that one is made up of arbitrary values and one is defined with useful data.

You can use Story Points internally in the team as a conversation starter, but most teams can't really make estimates, and even fewer understand the flawed use of the Fibonacci system for estimations. If you make a story point 3 points, then it is not 3 points. It is larger than 2 points and smaller than 5 points. The higher up you go, the larger the span: An 8 point story is larger than 5 points, but smaller than 13.

So you can have 7 tasks all being 8 points, yet they are all different (6,7,8,9,10,11,12). This means that when you convert story points to time, they will not be very accurate. You are better off making proper timed estimations instead.

Estimates also do not help when calculating costs, which is one of the key reasons for making estimations in the first place, since time estimations are for time to complete, not time to deliver.

I am constantly confused as to why people think there is a different in estimating with story points from how you do things in times estimations. Complexity and risk are always part of timed estimations. This is why early estimates are almost always higher than the more detailed estimates: You have to add time for risk and complexity.

The only reasonable use for Story Points is if the team want to have some conversation starter or if they are 100% isolated and report and collaborate with no one else. Otherwise always use times estimates and learn how to do it right:

https://youtu.be/1-lfePveqYk?si=HzvfnRh8XKtR2Vpb