Sprint Planning Poker — Free Online Tool
Make sprint planning faster, fairer, and more collaborative. Run planning poker sessions online with your scrum team — no account, no setup, free forever.
What is Sprint Planning?
Sprint planning is the Scrum ceremony that kicks off every sprint. The entire scrum team — product owner, scrum master, and developers — meets to define the sprint goal and select the backlog items they will commit to completing in the upcoming iteration. For a two-week sprint, this meeting is time-boxed to a maximum of eight hours, though most teams complete it in two to four.
The session has two distinct parts. In the first part, the product owner presents the highest-priority backlog items and explains the desired outcomes for the sprint. The team asks clarifying questions, refines acceptance criteria, and builds enough shared understanding of each story to estimate it confidently. In the second part, the team selects the stories they can realistically deliver and decomposes them into individual tasks.
A sprint goal — a concise statement of what the team intends to accomplish — is agreed upon before the meeting ends. The goal provides focus when unexpected work arises mid-sprint: if something is not in service of the sprint goal, it should not displace committed stories. Well-formed sprint goals also give stakeholders a meaningful progress signal without requiring them to track individual tickets.
Capacity planning is the other critical input. The team accounts for planned leave, company holidays, and non-sprint work (on-call rotations, tech debt, recurring meetings) to establish realistic availability. Selecting more stories than the team can deliver at full capacity is one of the most common sprint planning failures — and planning poker helps prevent it by grounding commitments in the team's collective judgment rather than optimistic individual estimates.
Why Use Planning Poker for Sprint Planning?
Prevents anchoring
Cards are hidden until everyone has committed to a number. No senior estimate is heard before junior team members form their own opinion. This produces more honest, diverse input and surfaces knowledge gaps that a top-down estimate would miss entirely.
Engages the entire team
Sprint planning is a team ceremony, but in practice it is easy for estimation to be dominated by one or two voices. Planning poker structurally requires every participant to vote. QA engineers, frontend developers, and backend engineers all contribute — and their different perspectives often reveal dependencies that a solo estimate would overlook.
Surfaces knowledge gaps before development starts
A wide spread of votes — say, a 2 and a 13 on the same story — is not a problem to resolve quickly by averaging. It is a signal that team members have fundamentally different understandings of what the story requires. Resolving that disagreement during sprint planning costs minutes. Discovering it mid-sprint costs days.
Learn more in our complete guide: How Planning Poker Works — Step by Step
Sprint Planning Checklist
Use this checklist before your sprint planning session to ensure the team is set up for a productive, time-boxed meeting.
- Product backlog groomed and stories ranked by priority
- Acceptance criteria written for all candidate stories
- Entire development team assembled (developers, QA, design)
- Card deck chosen to match your team's estimation convention
- Session time-boxed to two hours or less for a two-week sprint
- Definition of Done agreed upon and visible to all participants
- Product owner available to answer clarifying questions in real time
Integrates With Your Workflow
Corgi Planning Poker is tool-agnostic by design. Whether your team tracks work in Jira, Linear, GitHub Issues, or a Notion board, you can run a planning poker session alongside your existing workflow. Open Corgi in a browser tab during your sprint planning meeting, paste story titles or IDs into the room description as you go, estimate them one by one, then carry the agreed point values back into your issue tracker. No integrations to configure, no API keys to manage, and no risk of your estimating tool going down during a critical planning session. When running sprint planning sessions, opening Corgi alongside your backlog tracker and pasting story IDs as room topics keeps the team aligned — the agreed estimate goes straight into your tracker with no context switching.
For remote and async-heavy teams, Corgi's guest identity system means anyone with the room link can join immediately — from a Slack notification, a calendar invite, or a direct message. There is no onboarding friction, no "please create an account first" wall, and no installation on mobile. The same room link works on every device, making it equally accessible for a developer joining from their work laptop and a product manager on a phone during commute planning.