02
No story points
We do not estimate in story points, T-shirt sizes, or Fibonacci. Estimates are wall-clock days, given by the engineer who will do the work, after the spec is written.
Placeholder method entry. Rewrite the body before launch.
Story points were invented to avoid the political cost of being wrong about days. We pay that cost on purpose. An estimate is a number of working days, given by the engineer who will do the work, after they have read the spec.
Estimates are wrong about half the time. That is fine. The discipline is not to be right; it is to be specific enough that the wrongness can be measured and learned from.
Why
Points obscure. Days are legible to everyone — to the engineer, to the founder, to the client paying the invoice. When a five-day task takes nine days, that is a fact you can investigate. When a three-point story takes a five-point story’s worth of effort, that is theatre.
How we do it
- Engineer estimates after the spec is merged, not before.
- Estimates above five days get split. If you cannot split it, the spec is wrong.
- We track variance per engineer per quarter. We do not punish variance — we use it to fix scoping.