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David Jiménez
David Jiménez

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Reaching consensus and empowering discussions in your technical team

Technical discussions can (and will) prove challenging and sometimes blocking. Surveying the team is enriching though, and helps with the spread of knowledge, awareness of relevant topics and speeds up decision making.

Planning Poker can serve as a tool to poll the team for certain topics, and get to know their opinions quickly while empowering discussions.

Here’s a screenshot of an example of what such a “survey poker” session could be:

Image description

Several topics could be polled with this method. The cards used for such sessions are pretty self-explanatory:

  • Yay: “I agree with this topic”
  • Nay: “I disagree with this topic”
  • RFI: “Request for Information. I need more information about this topic to make an informed decision“
  • STC: “Show me The Code“. A variant of “RFI”, you’d like to see code to make an informed decision.
  • POC: “Proof of Concept”. I like the topic, let’s put it to the test in our project or in a sample one to make a better informed decision.
  • ?: “I have no strong feelings one way or the other/ I don’t care“
  • Pass: Equal to ?

Upon revealing, team members can debate on why they chose a certain card and bring those points/concerns to the rest of the team. Afterwards team members can change their vote, should they will.

This techniques works even on big teams. Since then you can pass the results to the management team to help them on their decision making.

Happy voting!

Trivia

  • This technique is homonymous to the real world referendums.

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