About this site

Who I am

I've spent a good part of my career as a Scrum Master and agile coach, sitting in the room (and, increasingly, the video call) while teams argue about whether a user story is a 3 or a 5. Those conversations are where estimation earns its keep: not in the number itself, but in the shared understanding a team builds while getting there. Over the years I've facilitated sprint planning and backlog refinement for teams of very different shapes — from tiny product squads to larger groups that needed a bit more structure to stay aligned.

I'm not a vendor and this isn't a startup. I'm a practitioner who got tired of the gap between how estimation should feel and how the available tools actually behaved. So I built the thing I wished I had.

Why I built Planning Poker

Most online Planning Poker tools ask for accounts, gate the useful features behind a paywall, or bury a simple team activity under sign-up flows and upsells. When you just want to run a 20-minute estimation round with five people — three of them remote — that friction is the enemy. People drop off before the session even starts.

I wanted something you could open, share with a link, and start using in seconds: no registration, no credit card, works on the phone of the colleague who joined from the train. Cards stay hidden until everyone has voted, so nobody anchors on the first number spoken or defers to the loudest person in the room. When the cards flip, the outliers spark the discussion — and that discussion is the whole point.

What makes it different

Beyond the tool, I've tried to turn this site into a genuinely useful resource for people learning agile estimation — guides on story points and the Fibonacci scale, a full Scrum basics course, and a hands-on Lego estimation exercise I've run in real workshops. Everything is written from practice, not scraped from a dozen other blogs.

The site is free and always will be. To cover hosting and the time that goes into writing and maintaining it, content pages carry a few unobtrusive ads. I never put ads inside a live estimation session — that would hurt the exact experience the tool exists to protect.