Run your first estimation session

This walkthrough takes you from a blank browser tab to one work item with an agreed estimate on it. It takes about ten minutes with your team in the call, and everything in it works on the Free plan.

What you need#

• An email address you can read right now. There is no password to create.
• One real backlog item to estimate. A made-up one works, but a real one gives the team something to argue about, which is the point.
• Your team, for the last three sections. You can do the first three alone.

The Free plan includes one Workspace — a Planning Room and a Retro Room — with unlimited teammates in both.

Sign in#

SprintBee signs you in with a one-time code, not a password.

1. Open the sign-in screen and enter your email address.
2. Select Send my sign-in code.
3. Check your inbox and enter the code you were sent.

The first time an address signs in, its account is created for it. There is no separate sign-up step.

Only the person setting the team up needs to do this. Teammates joining a room normally do not sign in at all.

Create your Workspace#

A Workspace is the durable home for one team's ceremonies. It holds a Planning Room for estimation and a Retro Room for retrospectives, and both persist sprint after sprint — you never recreate a room for a meeting.

1. Go to /create, or select Create Workspace from your dashboard.
2. Give the Workspace a name. Your team or product name is the usual choice.
3. Enter your display name — the one your teammates will see in the room.
4. Pick your own voting role: Dev, QA, or Observer. Observers watch and facilitate but are not counted as voters.
5. If you belong to an organization, choose whether this Workspace is personal or lives in that organization.
6. Submit the form.

SprintBee creates the Workspace and opens its Planning Room with you in it as the moderator.

Pick a deck and a voting flow#

The first time a moderator enters a new Planning Room, a Customize your room panel asks how the team wants to estimate: which deck, whether people can vote immediately or wait for the moderator to start each round, whether to run a countdown timer, and whether Dev and QA give separate estimates.

The deck starts as Modified Fibonacci — 0, 0.5, 1, 2, 3, 5, 8, 13, 20, 40, 100 and ?. For a first session, take the defaults and select Start estimating. Every one of these choices is changeable later under Room settings, and closing the panel without saving simply accepts the defaults.

Invite your team#

Select Invite teammates in the participants rail. The room's join link goes straight to your clipboard; paste it into chat, a calendar invite, or the meeting description.

Teammates open the link, enter a display name, choose Dev, QA, or Observer, and they are in. They do not need a SprintBee account unless the Workspace requires sign-in — a room password is just one more field on the join screen, not an account. Anyone who has the six-character room code instead of the link can enter it at /join.

Add the first work item#

A new room starts with an empty queue and prompts you to fill it.

1. Select Add work items.
2. On the Write tab, give the item a title, and a description if the team will need one.
3. Add it. It joins the queue, and the first queued item becomes the one the room is estimating.

If the Workspace has a Jira or Linear connection, this panel gains a second tab where moderators search that tracker and import issues directly. Those connections are configured in Workspace settings, not inside the room — leave them for later and type your first item by hand.

Run the round#

Every round is the same four beats, and after one you will not need this page again.

Vote#

Everyone with a voting role picks a card. With the default preferences voting is open as soon as the item is up, and every vote stays hidden until the reveal, so nobody anchors on the first number they see. On a numeric deck you can type the value instead of clicking it.

Reveal#

When the votes are in, reveal them. Every estimate appears at once.

A wide spread is a good outcome, not a failed round: it means two people are picturing different work. The fastest way through it is to ask the highest and the lowest voter what they were each imagining, then re-vote. Clearing the votes reopens the round for a second pass.

Accept#

Once the team lands on a number, accept it. The item moves into the room's completed history, the next queued item comes up, and a toast gives you five seconds to undo if you accepted the wrong value.

Moderators can drive all of this from the keyboard:

Key	Action
S	Start voting — only in rooms set to "Moderator starts"
R	Reveal the votes
A	Accept the estimate on screen
N	Skip this item and send it to the back of the queue
C	Clear the votes and re-vote

Turn on keyboard hints in your preferences and each letter is shown on its button, so you can learn them without memorising this table.

Where to go next#

Repeat the round for the rest of the backlog. When the meeting ends, the Workspace, its rooms, and the completed history are all still there for next sprint.

From here, the useful next steps are connecting your issue tracker so items arrive with their real titles and estimates flow back, and setting up the Workspace's Retro Room so the same team can close the loop at the end of the sprint.