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Async planning poker

When a team is spread over eight time zones, finding an hour that suits everyone is hard. Estimating asynchronously can work, as long as you keep what makes planning poker useful: independent votes and a conversation about the differences.

What async does well

• Independent votes. People vote when they have time to read the story properly, and nobody hears a number first.
• The easy stories. Stories where everyone lands on the same card don’t need a meeting at all.
• Inclusion. Nobody has to join at midnight.

What it does badly

• The disagreements. A wide spread needs the lowest and highest voter to explain themselves, and a thread is a slow place to do that.
• Momentum. Without a deadline, the last two votes arrive next week.

A hybrid that works

1. Write the stories for reading, not for talking. Acceptance criteria, links and open questions in the description, because nobody can ask the product owner in the moment.
2. Give a voting window. “Vote by 10:00 UTC Thursday.”
3. Reveal at a short sync. Accept the stories that agree in seconds, and spend the meeting only on the ones that don’t.
4. Leave a note. Record why a number was chosen so the people who missed the call can follow.

Doing it in PointHuddle

PointHuddle is built for live sessions, with one story on the table at a time, but a room can stay open for a day:

• Turn Auto-reveal off in Room settings, so the first person to vote doesn’t trigger the reveal.
• Start the round and share the link. Votes are saved, so people can vote and leave. The table marks who has already voted, including people who have gone away.
• Reveal at your sync, or when the window closes.
• Choose how long the room is kept (7, 30 or 90 days) so it survives the gap between sessions.

If most of your estimation is asynchronous, with many stories open at once, a tool built for that will suit you better. For a team that meets briefly and wants the votes in beforehand, the steps above are enough.