Pre-story Story Points?

Today was a first for me — we used Fibonacci story points to estimate… not stories. Yup, the company wants estimates pre-stories.

It felt like I used up 30 minutes of the estimation meeting trying to wrap my head around the value that was supposed to come from putting stories points against a project that hadn’t been discussed, researched, or designed. In honesty, I still don’t get it… but we were able to come up with a [really] rough estimate. The exercise wasn’t terrible; our team learned some things through the discussion.

I think it points to the company’s interest in understanding what it’s committing to before committing to it. But it’d be nice to know that it was providing solid value to somebody.

There are all these ideas bouncing around my brain lately about user story mapping, and experience mapping, and OKRs, and Jobs to be Done, and defining/measuring success, and... I’m hoping that sometime soon my brain will stop churning and pour out something smooth and delicious that will help me better prioritize my efforts.