Polls Templates in Teams Meetings

This would definitely be useful. I manage a team of developers and testers. We are all remote. Story point estimates are a pain without people in a conference room with planning poker cards.

Prior to the pandemic, we all met in a room with a deck of planning poker cards. After reviewing a user story, each team member would chose their estimate, and keep the card face-down on the table. Once everyone had chosen their estimate, we all flipped the cards up at the same time. This allowed people to give honest feedback about the level of effort to develop and test a new feature. We had frequent differences in opinion that prompted further discussions that were very useful to the team.

Once the pandemic started, we all went home and convened on Teams. At first I just had people send a message to the meeting chat with their story point estimate. I observed a change in how people estimated work. After the first estimate or two came into the chat window, I saw very few differences in story point estimates. We seem to have completely lost that honest feedback.

If the first person - especially a senior developer - throws out a 3-point estimate, the teammates with less experience, or who were less comfortable with disagreements, tended to agree with the first estimate. Since we all agreed, we never got into discussions about the "gotcha's" a user story might have. We have struggled ever since due to botched story point estimates.

Recently I started using polls in Teams. This allowed me to replicate the social experience of providing an anonymous estimate until "reveal time". It has brought back those differences in opinions, and these technical discussions have come back. These discussions have been crucial in identifying "gotcha's" in our user stories that would have resulted in missing our goals for a sprint.

The process for creating these polls isn't the most labor-intensive thing in the world if you do it once. I need to do this multiple times during a backlog grooming session. We can review and estimate a half dozen stories or more, where each story is its own poll.

Creating a poll roughly goes like this:

1. Create a new poll.
2. The poll name is typically <story Id> Estimate
3. Add these options: 0, 1, 2, 3, 5, 8, 13, 13+
4. Choose to hide the results from participants.
5. Choose to record names of respondents
   • This gets used later to identify differences in opinion to prompt further discussion
6. Submit poll.

It results in an awkward silence while the team listens to me typing on a keyboard. Or I mute myself, and the silence remains awkward (and then I usually forget to unmute myself).

It would be really nice to create a template so I can create a new poll with a click or two.

I have tried reopening polls before, but it doesn't reset people's feedback, so it is difficult to tell when everyone has (re)voted. Additionally, most people are unable to find the poll again. I guess it doesn't pop up if the person moves focus away from the meeting window. Either way, reopening a poll is more work than creating a new one, because I spend 15 minute helping people get back to the poll they already submitted to re-vote. And then I'm not sure when everyone has re-submitted their votes.