Including Stakeholders in Planning Poker - When and How
Should stakeholders participate in planning poker or just observe? Our product owner wants to vote, and our VP wants to attend sessions. Where do you draw the line on who participates vs who just listens?
Product Owner participates fully - they understand business complexity and acceptance criteria, so they should vote on user-facing stories. But they abstain on purely technical stories they don't understand.
VP and other stakeholders observe only. They can ask clarifying questions, but they never vote. The people doing the work own the estimates. Make this explicit in your planning poker ground rules and post them visibly.
We use "voting" vs "advisory" roles clearly defined. Voting members: Dev team (always), Product Owner (user stories), Architect (technical stories). Advisory members: Stakeholders, managers, subject matter experts.
Advisory members can participate in discussion and show cards, but their vote is just input. Voting members decide final estimate. This lets stakeholders contribute knowledge without creating pressure.
Hot take: Stakeholder presence ruins honest estimation. Team will unconsciously anchor to whatever the VP says or fears looking "slow" if they vote high.
We run two sessions: private team-only planning poker for initial estimates, then stakeholder review where we explain our numbers and rationale. Separation protects psychological safety and produces more honest estimates.
Product Owner should absolutely vote - they understand acceptance criteria, edge cases, and integration points better than developers sometimes. Their estimate of business complexity is valuable.
But VP attending is a red flag. Why do they care about individual story estimates? That's micromanagement. They should care about velocity trends and roadmap delivery, not whether a story is 5 or 8 points. Push back on that.