This article was originally published on Medium .

I just feel it is "2", no, I think it is "3".

When I first came across story points, I always wondered how the "experienced" people on the team were calling out numbers so confidently. Now that I've become one of those "experienced" people — I realized I still didn't have a stronger framework for it. Like everyone else, I'd gone with gut feeling. Others would nod along, and sometimes we'd walk out with no real sense of why. All I knew was it should follow the Fibonacci series. Everyone had different intuitions, and the loudest voice — or the consensus — won.

So I tried to build a mental model for myself (not used by the team, yet) , so I'd have something to point at when I picked a number.…