🤖 Prompt 3 of 7
User Story Estimation: Assumption-Surfacing Questions
Use this when your team's estimates cluster around 5-8 points and you suspect they're guessing rather than thinking. Or when one person estimates a story at 2 points and another says 13.
From the article 7 AI Prompts for Sprint Planning: Backlog to Execution
3
Prompt 3
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Prompt
For this user story: [paste story]
Before we estimate, answer these:
1. What's the happy path? What are we *not* including in this story?
2. Who needs to be involved to complete this (frontend, backend, QA, ops)?
3. Have we built something similar before? If yes, what took longer than expected?
4. What's the one assumption we're making that could be wrong?
5. If this story took twice as long as we think, what would be the reason? Replace before pasting:
[paste story] More prompts from this article
- #1 Sprint Goal Definition: Capacity-Aligned Goal Extraction
- #2 Backlog Prioritization: Value-vs-Complexity Ranking
- #4 Task Breakdown: Dependency and Blocker Identification
- #5 Daily Standup: Progress-and-Blockers Prompts
- #6 Sprint Review Preparation: Stakeholder-Ready Demo Prompts
- #7 Retrospective Prompts: Structured Improvement Discovery