Fibonacci with Sprint Poker
The start card is set to the classic Fibonacci deck: 0, 1, 2, 3, 5, 8, 13, 21, 34, 55, 89, plus ? and coffee. Your new room comes with a reference story and four stories to size against it, so the first round can start as soon as your team opens the link.
- Type your name and press Enter. The room opens with the Fibonacci deck and five stories: one reference story and four to estimate.
- Share the link or the QR code. Everyone joins with a display name; nobody signs up.
- Agree the reference first: the team says aloud why "add a field to the signup form" is a 3. Every later card is a comparison with it, not a guess in hours.
- Vote on the next story by clicking a card or typing its number. Press R to reveal; the panel shows average, median, spread and the people who voted lowest and highest.
- If the spread is two or more cards apart, hear the outliers, re-vote, then pick the final value and press N for the next story.
What to know
The Fibonacci deck works because the gaps grow with the size of the work. Telling a 2 from a 3 is realistic for small stories; telling a 20 from a 21 is not, so the deck simply does not offer it. Each value is about 1.6 times the one before, which matches how uncertainty grows: the larger the story, the coarser the choice the team has to make. The scale was popularised for planning poker by Mike Cohn, building on the game James Grenning described in 2002.
Points only mean something relative to a shared reference. Pick a finished story most of the team worked on, agree its value (a 3 or a 5 gives room on both sides), and keep it visible as the first item in the backlog. When a new story comes up, the question is "bigger or smaller than the reference, and by how much", which a team answers far more consistently than "how many hours".
Large cards are a signal, not an estimate. Many teams treat anything above 13 as "split before we commit", because a 21 or a 34 usually hides several stories and unknowns. The 34, 55 and 89 cards are still useful in refinement: when half the room plays 34 on an epic, that is a fast, honest way to say it is not ready for a sprint.
After each reveal Sprint Poker shows the average, the median, the spread in deck positions and a consensus badge when everyone played the same card. The suggested value is the most common card, with ties going to the larger one because estimates tend to run low; you still choose the final value. The ? and coffee cards are not counted in the statistics.
Updated · Cosmovex
Questions
Which values are in the Fibonacci deck?
0, 1, 2, 3, 5, 8, 13, 21, 34, 55 and 89, plus ? for "not sure" and a coffee card for "I need a break". If you want 20, 40 and 100 instead of the larger Fibonacci numbers, use the modified Fibonacci deck.
Why do story points use the Fibonacci sequence?
Because the distance between values grows with size, the deck forces coarser choices for bigger, less certain work. It stops the team debating a 12 against a 13 when nobody can know the difference.
What does a 0 mean?
A story that takes so little effort it is not worth counting, such as a copy change already done. Some teams remove it; keep it if your team uses it to close tiny items quickly.
Can we vote with the keyboard?
Yes. Type a card's number to vote, press R to reveal and N to move to the next story. The facilitator can also start a 30-second to 5-minute countdown that reveals automatically.
Can I switch the deck mid-session?
Yes. The facilitator can change the deck in the room settings at any time; votes already cast stay as they were.
The free plan covers everything on this page. Sprint Poker Pro ($29, paid once) is described on the Sprint Poker page.
