A longer TL;DR answer — The use of story point estimation is situational. Not every team benefits from a process as heavy as point-based estimation. Points are used to keep a team accountable for what they are meant to deliver and their velocity for delivery.
Examine Your Situation
Whether or not you are using points, the question for most engineering teams is: are you delivering what is expected in the time that is expected?
So my question back to my PM friend was, is your team delivering as expected, or are they missing the mark?
Turns out, his team is in a classic situation: they are using point-based estimation, but they are constantly missing their delivery goals. So, regardless of your estimation system, here are a few questions to ask yourself as a manager when you are in this situation:
- Is your team truly accounting for everything they are working on in a given sprint?
- Is your team estimating correctly?
- Is your team underdelivering?
These are three separate problems. For this write-up, I will focus on diagnosing the problems and give suggestions on how to fix the problem. I am going to assume you have heard of things like agile, Kanban, waterfall and have some familiarity with what those are. If not, check out the topics on the internet.