Why Story Points are NOT trash! 💥

Recently, I noticed another ‘Story Points are trash’ article on LinkedIn. It was a popular post, with many people responding to AND agreeing with this statement.

I disagree. 😱

I’ve frequently used Story Points with my teams. They have proven to trigger valuable conversations about effort and complexity. Team members often seemed to have different ideas on how much effort something would take, so it was helpful to make this transparent early on and discuss the variances.

We had one important rule, though:

We threw away the estimates afterward. It was only intended to have a conversation during Sprint Planning or refinement.

We never used it to track progress during the Sprint or check the project’s overall progress (yes, I used Scrum often for client projects).

I admit we have tried it, but we quickly noticed that Story Points can easily become abused and lose value. ❌

So, Story Points never left our team space and were not considered the ultimate truth. They weren’t added to our ticketing system, and we didn’t turn them into a management report. They were a conversation starter.

Story Points become problematic when they become a fixed practice across teams.

“From now on, all teams estimate all work in Story Points. It will result in lots of predictability, and we’ll know exactly when the work will be done.”

Of course, you won’t!

Story Points are not the problem. It’s how people use them.