Estimation Across Time Zones - Distributed Team Planning Poker
Team spread across San Francisco (PST), London (GMT), and Bangalore (IST). Finding common meeting time means someone is always at midnight or 6am. How do you run planning poker with 13-hour time zone difference? Async? Hybrid? Regional sub-teams?
Hybrid async-sync model works best: Async voting window (24hrs) using online planning poker tool, then live sync discussion for outliers only.
Process: Post stories with detailed AC, team votes async over 24hrs, tool automatically flags stories with >2 point variance. Find 1-hour overlap for meeting to discuss only flagged stories. We get consensus on 80% of stories without meeting, deep dive on complex 20%. Best of both worlds.
Regional estimation pods: SF team estimates frontend stories (their expertise), London estimates backend stories, Bangalore estimates data pipeline work. Each pod owns estimation for their domain.
Normalize estimates using reference stories all regions estimated together. Works when teams are somewhat independent and have clear ownership boundaries. Doesn't work if everyone needs full context on everything.
Record and relay method: Earliest timezone (SF) does live planning poker with recording, next timezone (London) watches recording 1.5x speed and votes async with comments, final timezone (Bangalore) reviews all votes and discusses outliers in their morning.
Feels inefficient but maintains conversation benefit of planning poker. Each region contributes perspective, nobody is up at 2am. Full cycle takes 24 hours but we plan once per 2-week sprint so it's acceptable.
Controversial take: Find the 1-hour overlap or reorganize teams. SF-London has 8am SF/4pm London overlap. London-Bangalore has 9am London/2:30pm Bangalore overlap. If team truly can't sync for 60 minutes weekly, you don't have one team - you have 3 separate teams.
Either rotate "pain" meeting time (this sprint SF stays late, next sprint Bangalore wakes early - shared sacrifice), or split into timezone-aligned teams with clear ownership boundaries. Async everything loses too much collaborative value.