Sprint Planning Meeting Format - What Works Best?
Our sprint planning meetings drag on for 4+ hours. What's the most efficient format? Do you do planning poker during sprint planning or separate? How do you structure the agenda?
Split it. Day 1 (1 hour): PO presents stories, devs ask clarifying questions only. Homework: everyone estimates independently. Day 2 (90 min): Review outlier estimates only (>3 point variance), discuss, reach consensus. Final 30 min: commit to sprint backlog.
We went from 4 hours to 2.5 hours total and estimates got BETTER because people had time to think.
We use the Two-Part format: Part 1 (1 hour) = What are we building? PO demos, answers questions. Part 2 (1 hour) = How will we build it? Devs decompose stories, estimate, commit. Break between parts gives people coffee and brain reset. Works great.
Do refinement sessions throughout the sprint (30 min, 2x/week). By sprint planning, stories are already estimated. Planning becomes pure commitment meeting: 45 minutes max. We rank stories by priority, pull until capacity is full, done. No more marathon planning sessions.
Timebox ruthlessly. 5 min per story for estimation discussion. If you can't decide in 5 min, table it for refinement and move on. We use a visible timer on screen. Sounds aggressive but it forces POs to write better stories and kills bikeshedding.
Controversial: we eliminated sprint planning entirely. Continuous refinement, kanban pull system. Devs pull next priority story when ready. Estimation happens async in Jira. Sprint 'planning' is just a 15-minute kickoff reviewing goals. Been doing this 6 months, productivity up 30%.