One common sequence is based on doubling each number: 1, 2, 4, 8, 16, 32, 64. Participants are all given an identical deck of cards (or chips), each with a different number. For an agile software organization, stakeholders can include a product owner, developers, UX designers, QA testers, and product managers, among others. Planning poker brings together stakeholders from across departments in the organization to reach a consensus on the estimated effort needed for several backlog initiatives.

The design of this process was to help software organizations more accurately estimate development timeframes, build consensus among the members of the cross-functional team, and more strategically plan the team’s work.

These cards, which look like playing cards, estimate the number of story points for each backlog story or task up for discussion. The name from this gamified technique is planning poker because participants use physical cards.

Planning poker (also called Scrum poker) helps agile teams estimate the time and effort needed to complete each initiative on their product backlog.