Example data. Fieldnote is a fictional company used to fill every board, so the examples tell one consistent story.
Fieldnote, Field app squad, refinement done the day before. Reference item: the signature capture screen, agreed at 3.
What the team took away
Story C never got a number. The 13 came from the only person who had read the sync code, and the gap revealed a product decision nobody had made about which version wins offline.
How to run it
Preparation
Bring items that have already been through refinement. Sizing something nobody understands produces a number that means nothing.
Limit the session to ten items. Past that, attention drops and the estimates drift upward.
Use a scale with gaps (1, 2, 3, 5, 8, 13). Adjacent numbers invite haggling; gaps force a choice.
Agree what the unit compares to: pick one known item everyone remembers and call it the reference.
Agenda
10 min
Set the reference Take one item the team delivered recently, agree its size out loud, and leave it visible. Every later estimate is relative to it.
3 min
Present an item The PM reads the item and the acceptance criteria. Questions are allowed, opinions are not.
2 min
Everyone reveals at once All cards turned over at the same time. Simultaneity is the whole mechanism: it stops the senior engineer from setting the anchor.
8 min
The outliers explain Only the lowest and the highest speak, in that order. This is the part that has value: one of them knows something the room does not.
2 min
Re-vote once One more round. If it still splits, the item is not understood well enough and goes back to refinement rather than getting averaged.
Pitfalls
Averaging the votes. The average hides the disagreement, which was the only thing the session produced.
Letting the tech lead speak first. Whoever speaks first sets the anchor, and the round becomes a vote on their number.
Turning points into days. The moment a point equals a day, the team starts estimating to please the calendar.
Afterwards
Items that split twice go back to refinement or get sliced. If the team keeps arguing about the unit rather than the item, T-shirt sizing is the honest version for a while.