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How to Play Planning Poker, Step by Step

Stylized illustration of an agile team around a table playing planning poker, each person holding up an estimation card, with a task ticket and a lightbulb of consensus floating above them
Matt Lewandowski

Matt Lewandowski

Last updated 21/06/20266 min read

Planning poker is quick to run and easy to get wrong. The mechanics take a minute to explain, but the value comes from how you handle the votes you didn't expect. This guide walks through one full round, then covers the parts most teams trip on: running it async, keeping estimates honest, and pushing the result back to your backlog. New to the technique itself? Start with what planning poker is and come back here for the how.

What you need before you start

You don't need much, and you definitely don't need to import anything. Most teams are already screen-sharing the ticket somewhere and just want a fast place to gather votes.

A deck. Fibonacci (1, 2, 3, 5, 8, 13, 20...) is the default; T-shirt sizes work too. See which scale to pick and why we use Fibonacci.

A short list of refined stories. Five to ten is plenty for one sitting. If yours aren't ready, refine them first.

The people who will do the work. Skip the wider audience; estimates come from the delivery team.

How one round works

Every story follows the same loop. The point of the simultaneous reveal is to stop the room anchoring on the first number someone says out loud.
  1. Present the story
    Read the story, share acceptance criteria, and take questions. Keep it brief. This isn't the design meeting.
  2. Everyone votes at once
    Each person picks the card that matches the effort they expect. Votes stay hidden until the reveal, so nobody is nudged by what the lead picked.
  3. Reveal together
    Flip all cards at the same time. Agreement means you're done. A wide spread is the interesting part, not a problem.
  4. Talk through the outliers
    Ask the lowest and highest voters to explain first. The high voter usually knows about a risk the low voter doesn't, and that's the whole reason you're doing this.
  5. Re-vote and lock it in
    Vote again once the unknowns are on the table. Take the consensus number, not the average, and record it.
In Kollabe, that loop is the room. Open one, share the link, and your team votes in seconds with no signup. Planning poker room in Kollabe showing the Fibonacci card deck along the bottom with a story to estimate at the top and participant avatars around the table When everyone has voted, reveal the round. Kollabe lays out each person's card and the spread so the discussion has something concrete to point at. Planning poker round revealed in Kollabe, showing each participant's vote side by side with the distribution of estimates and the average

Run it async when a meeting won't fit

A live round is great when everyone's online at once. Distributed teams rarely are. Async planning poker drops the meeting entirely: open the rounds, share the link, and votes land over a few hours instead of a few minutes. Reveal once everyone's weighed in. Flip on Asynchronous voting in the room settings and everyone can vote ahead of time. It fits naturally with agile ceremonies across time zones, and it means a backlog of twenty stories doesn't need a calendar invite. More on the trade-offs in our async planning poker guide. Kollabe planning poker room settings with the asynchronous voting toggle alongside auto-reveal, anonymous voting, and change-vote controls

Keep your estimates honest

The mechanics are easy. Reading the room is where sessions go sideways.

Keep votes hidden until the reveal so nobody anchors on the senior engineer's card.

Turn on anonymous voting when seniority gaps make people hedge toward the "safe" number.

Open every discussion with the extremes. The outliers hold the information everyone else is missing.

Timebox each story to about two minutes. If the spread won't close after a second vote, you have a different problem.

Connect it to your backlog

A number is only useful if it ends up where the work lives. Kollabe pulls tickets in and pushes estimates back, so the room isn't a detour from your tracker.
📥Import your tickets

Pull stories from Jira, GitHub, Azure DevOps, Linear, or a CSV. Or skip the import and type a title.

🔄Sync estimates back

The winning vote writes straight back to story points in Jira, Azure DevOps, or Linear. No copy-paste.

📋Full ticket in a side panel

Read the description, acceptance criteria, and custom Jira fields without leaving the room.

🧭See past estimates

Similar-round linking surfaces what comparable work scored in earlier sprints, so you estimate against your own history.

Kollabe planning poker room menu showing import and sync options for Jira, Linear, and CSV alongside custom card decks and analytics If your team lives in Claude or Cursor, you can also drive rooms over the MCP server to create rounds and read results without leaving your editor.

Try it with your team

That's the whole game: present, vote, reveal, discuss, converge. The tool should stay out of the way of that loop, not add steps to it. Start a planning poker room. No signup, just share the link and vote. Want to poke around first? Open the demo room and try a round on your own.

Keep it to the people who'll do the work, usually three to nine. Larger groups slow the discussion down without making estimates more accurate.

Let the lowest and highest voters explain, then re-vote. If two rounds don't converge, the story is probably too big or too vague, so split it or send it back to refinement rather than forcing a number.

Fibonacci is the common default because the widening gaps reflect how uncertainty grows with size. T-shirt sizes feel friendlier for teams new to estimation. Either works; compare them here.

Yes. Async voting lets everyone cast their card on their own schedule, which suits distributed teams and large backlogs. Open the rounds, share the link, and reveal once the votes are in.