Mitch Lacey's Estimation Game Template
Estimate and prioritize your tasks using Mitch Lacey’s tried-and-tested Scrum game — to help your teams work more efficiently.
Trusted by 65M+ users and leading companies
About the Mitch Lacey’s Estimation Game template
Reviewing your backlog doesn’t have to be boring — especially not when you’re playing Mitch Lacey’s Estimation Game, a group activity designed to bring teams together and make priorities clearer.
What is Mitch Lacey’s Estimation Game?
First introduced in his book, The Scrum Field Guide: Practical Advice for your First Year, Mitch Lacey’s Estimation Game is a visual exercise designed to help Agile teams prioritize tasks in their project backlog together — similar to other Agile practices like Scrum Poker. Teams can estimate how high of a priority their tasks are by arranging them along a matrix, which helps measure how important a task is and how much effort it will take.
How do you use the template for Mitch Lacey’s Estimation Game?
We’ve prepared a short step-by-step process to help you make the most of the template for Mitch Lacey’s Estimation Game. Let’s take a look:
1. Understand the matrix
When you first open the template in Miro, you’ll see a matrix, which you’ll use to estimate and assign priorities to your tasks. The x-axis represents how big or small a task is — in other words, how much effort it’ll take to complete it. The y-axis represents how high or low of a priority it is — whether that’s based on ROI, business impact, or any other important metrics. Talk to your team about how you want to measure a task’s priority.
2. Use sticky notes to represent your tasks
When you’re ready, use the sticky notes to represent your tasks on the matrix. Write one task per sticky note, such as “landing page design” or “CMS evaluation”. The template comes with a few sticky notes already, but you can always add more if you need them.
3. Arrange your sticky notes along the matrix
Once you’ve written down all your tasks, arrange the sticky notes along the matrix based on their priority and task size. Tasks in the top-left are small and of higher priority. Tasks in the top-right are also more important but take more effort to complete — consider breaking these tasks into smaller goals. Tasks in the bottom right are less of a priority and take more effort to complete — place them toward the bottom of your backlog. Tasks in the bottom-left are also of low priority but take less effort to complete.
Talk to your team about how to best rearrange your backlog. Want a quicker way to decide on priorities? Start a voting session right on your Miro board using our voting tool.
When should you use the Estimation Game?
Play Mitch Lacey’s Estimation Game whenever your backlog has grown large and you find your team feeling overwhelmed. It can help you review your product backlog and recenter your team’s focus on the tasks that matter most. It’s also a great way for developers and product management teams to collaborate effectively and efficiently. Re-play the game anytime you find your backlog getting unmanageable — or refer to past iterations for guidance.
Get started with this template right now.
Lean Inception Workshop
Works best for:
Agile, Lean Methodology
The Lean Inception Workshop streamlines project kickoff by aligning teams on goals, scope, and priorities. It leverages Lean principles to eliminate waste and maximize value, guiding exercises to define user personas, map user journeys, and prioritize features. By fostering cross-functional collaboration and customer-centric thinking, this template accelerates project initiation and ensures alignment between stakeholders, empowering teams to deliver customer value faster.
Market Segmentation Matrix Template
Works best for:
Marketing, Strategic Planning, Product Management
Successful, compelling marketing begins and ends with knowing your audience — who they are, where they are, and what they want and expect. A market segmentation matrix will help you understand them on a deeper level. This business tool divides your target market into subsets based on demographics, geography, needs, interests, psychographics, or behavioral characteristics. You can then use these insights and data to hit it out of the park, by building better product, sales, and marketing strategies. Our template lets you set up and populate a Market Segmentation Matrix with ease.
Research Topic Brainstorm Template
Works best for:
Desk Research, Brainstorming, Ideation
Coming up with a topic for a research project can be a daunting task. Use the Research Topic Brainstorm template to take a general idea and transform it into something concrete. With the Research Topic Brainstorm template, you can compile a list of general ideas that interest you and then break them into component parts. You can then turn those parts into questions that might be the focus for a research project.
SAFe Roam Board
Works best for:
Agile Methodology, Operations, Agile Workflows
A SAFe ROAM Board is a framework for making risks visible. It gives you and your team a shared space to notice and highlight risks, so they don’t get ignored. The ROAM Board helps everyone consider the likelihood and impact of risks, and decide which risks are low priority versus high priority. The underlying principles of SAFe (Scaled Agile Framework) are: drive cost-effective solutions, apply systems thinking, assume that things will change, build incrementally, base milestones on evaluating working systems, and visualize and limit works in progress.
2x2 Prioritization Matrix Template
Works best for:
Operations, Strategic Planning, Prioritization
Ready to set boundaries, prioritize your to-dos, and determine just what features, fixes, and upgrades to tackle next? The 2x2 prioritization matrix is a great place to start. Based on the lean prioritization approach, this template empowers teams with a quick, efficient way to know what's realistic to accomplish and what’s crucial to separate for success (versus what’s simply nice to have). And guess what—making your own 2x2 prioritization matrix is easy.
PESTLE Analysis Template
Works best for:
Ideation, Strategic Planning, Business Management
Want to keep your company secure and performing soundly? You have to first know how you’ll be affected by outside elements and factors — especially those that are political, economic, social, technological, legal and environmental in nature. A PESTLE Analysis helps you identify them and prepare for them. With this easy-to-use template, you can conduct a PESTLE Analysis, then use the results to shape your strategic planning, budget allocation, marketing, product updates, and organizational change initiatives.