One may treat these cards as a joke. However, they are not. Conversely, a joke is often how teams make estimates. Story points, velocity, planning poker and all such stuff made us focus more and more on rituals whilst placing not nearly enough on value.

What research repeatedly shows is that the most reliable productivity metric is simply counting completed work items. In the long run any approach that takes into account weight or size of work items doesn't produce any better results. Why bother then? Especially that we can gather similar results almost effortlessly.

We don’t say that any upfront discussion about features or stories has no sense. In fact, there are two cases which we want to take into consideration.

The first one is when we deal with a feature that is simply too big and should be split. It is a discussion about the granularity of work items. Of course we don’t have to say no to an especially big story or feature in a specific context. However, most of the time splitting such an item isn't much of an issue and still results in finely grained and value-adding items.

The second case would be when we simply don’t know. Software development almost by design deals with a lot of complexity and uncertainty. We often have no insight how much time and effort building a feature would take. It doesn’t mean that we can’t start developing it. It simply means that it is more risky than regular work items and this is a valuable bit of data.

So here it is. The no bullshit estimation deck that sustains valuable conversations about the complexity and uncertainty whilst at the same time renders discussions on whether something is worth 8 or 5 story points utterly irrelevant.