If you’ve never done any kind of nutritional tracking or monitoring of your food input, looking at calories is a great first step. It gives you one number to focus on and is usually a much better approach than not tracking for becoming conscious of what you’re eating. Similarly, if you’ve never done any kind of systematic estimation of work and capacity, storypoints are a good starting point. You now have a single number to focus on and can get a decent estimate of how much work a given team can handle.

However, in many cases they are also both not enough to optimally do estimation or track your nutrition. If you want to take it to the next level in nutrition you would start to track your macros (protein, fat, carbs). It’s a slightly more complex approach, focusing on 3 different numbers and trying to find a balance, but generally gives you a more nuanced approach with regards to your objectives.

When estimating work in an organization, storypoints are insufficient. To preserve the storypoint (at least within your organization. We may have lost that war globally), you should start to look at different metrics and no longer use storypoints. Specifically I like one I adapted from working with Eventbrite a few years ago;

  • how new is the task to your team (ie a proxy for your confidence in the following estimate - if you’ve done this kind of work before, you should have smaller error bars around your deadline)
  • how long will it take you to deliver this task (time estimations are core to working within an organization, so I always advocate for an explicit deadline commitment, since it should prevent folks from trying to convert storypoints to hours)
  • what teammate to work allocation will it support (eg do you need 3 people with specific skills dedicated to it for 2 weeks, or can a junior pick it up alongside his other tasks).

This should give you all you need to properly allocate work within a given timebox.

NB one thing I left out here is the value of the task, as a general rule I think that discussion should be held elsewhere. You want your team to always grab the highest priority task, deliver that, and then look at the next one. Trying to fit in extra tasks that aren’t high impact is a bad idea - something I’ll cover in more detail in another post.