Points are a forcing function to agree on scope and have everyone think about complexity. Even if they’re upstream of nothing, they’re downstream of valuable di

Points are a forcing function to agree on scope and have everyone think about complexity. Even if they’re upstream of nothing, they’re downstream of valuable discussions that get the team on the same page and support each other better. This is what it usually looks like: “OK I think we agree on the scope of this task. How many points do we think it is?” “Well, that depends if we include X” (it turns out, we didn’t agree on the scope of the task!) You can’t anticipate everything, but I’ve had countless valuable discussions off the pack of pointing that resulted in things like: - agreeing on whether to include an anticipated set of clean-up as part of a task, that the team might have missed or disagreed on later - realizing a task is bigger than anyone thought or maybe could be parallelized, allowing the team to approach it more effectively or reprioritize to deliver more value Basically pointing results in a ton of timely & valuable insight that helps the team learn faster and row together better. There may be better ways to drive these conversations but I find pointing to be a pretty good driver. That said, points and valocity are not upstream of nothing - predictable velocity lets you know when to stop sprint planning. It lets you have these discussions on a reasonable cadence and not waste time fleshing out the tasks you won’t have time to touch until next sprint.