Planning poker

Designed for teams who are too busy shipping to stop and story point the old fashioned way.

Project Overview

ZenHub's vision is to be the project management tool software teams use in GitHub. The team wanted to help users perform more agile ceremonies in the product so I facilitated a design sprint workshop to test and validate an idea that will increase adoption and engagement of ZenHub Sprints so that users can see the benefits of other features like reporting and team velocity.

My Role

- Feature design lead
- Workshop facilitator

Applied Methodologies

Design sprint
Prototyping
Usability Testing

Project Scope

Jan 2021 - Mar 2021

The problem

ZenHub currently supports Estimation through a sidebar dropdown, where users can choose a story point value and apply it to an issue. Estimates are very important to product, as some of our key features (burndown chart, velocity chart, release report, Sprints) all rely on issues having Estimates.

I ran a design sprint with the goal of solving the following problems:

Customers don't know how to rely on agile best practises and end up doing a lot of manual tedious work
Customers don't know about all the features and how to rely on them in their role
Customers get discouraged by the initial manual and onboarding work needed to adopt a new habit (e.g. create projects to capture company goals and track them dynamically)

Estimation was identified to be the biggest opportunity in the product to address these problems. This is further validated by some of the trends we saw in the product:

38.4% of churn from the last 10 months was attributed to missing Scrum features like: Backlog refinement, Estimation & prioritization, Sprint Planning.

How might we facilitate best agile practices in ZenHub?

Design sprint question

The E-Z estimator 9000

After I facilitated a design sprint with 7 key team members, the winning idea to be tested had a few hypothesis to validate:

Planning poker can be used as a simple way to get estimates asynchronously
Refinement meetings will be cut down in time
Teams in a remote environment will feel more engaged.

After some paper sketching ideas, wireframe reviews with project owners and engineers, we got a solid prototype to test with users.

But what is story point estimation?

Story point estimation involves predicting the level of effort required to complete a development task or issue. This idea of relative sizing is the fundamental driver in Agile estimation.

Round 1 of testing

Scrum master

Outcomes

5/5 liked the idea of being notified by the system when there were issues with missing estimates on the board.
5/5 Participants thought it was effortless to estimate an issue and navigate to the next one using the prototype interface
3/5 Participants would like to use the estimation results page during their refinement meeting instead of async
0/5 Participants thought this could replace their existing experience estimating issues during meetings

Participants felt that the big value of estimation sessions is to identify the complexity and discuss synchronously.

Round 2 of testing

Scrum master

Patterns

Users loved the ease of use of a flyover experience to go through issues
Bringing the story points forward outside of a dropdown was a must
5/8 felt they wanted to be able to choose when to start a planning poker session vs automated messages
Unsure where is the best place to "start" an estimation session
This feature would only be successful with real-time voting

Issue page experience before planning poker

Issue page experience after planning poker

Beta release

1. Anyone can select the issues that need estimates and invite participants

2. Anyone can see voter statuses in real time, edit or delete participants

Success metrics

Sprints vs milestones adoption. Automated sprints released in March 2021 to the public and planning poker launched later in May 2021. Sprints has taken over milestones.