Thanks for reading and responding. I agree and find story pointing to be only useful for identifying work items that need to be broken down. But, in that context, it’s useful to separate an estimate of work hours “Definitely 12 hours!” from a guess at the amount of work “About a day and a half, give or take.”

Using the 1/2/3/5/8/13/21 system means that we’re not wasting time trying to nail exact time estimates (30 hours), but instead we’re comparing relative size (~2 days of works vs. ~3 days of work) without feeling like we’re making a firm time commitment.

That’s the only real use of story points in my book. Some teams use “T-Shirt Sizes” (S, M, L, XL, XXL) effectively to completely disconnect from time estimates, but I’ve only seen that used for estimating epics.