Teach the developers who estimate them to treat the process as the circle circumvent instead of the diameter and multiple by Pi. There you go - done.
If you overestimate everything then you end up idle at end of sprint & picking backlog items to bring in, so then product wants to put more points/stories into next sprint.
The system is seemingly designed to produce this outcome.
The system is to teach everyone how to lie and juke the system. It feels awful working in most sprint-based environments. Because even when you're highly productive it still feels like you failed in multiple places, and it always feels like you're being dishonest and have no real choice about it.
So instead of "ticket: make pasta for dinner" it was like "ticket 1: purchase prego & pasta from instacart" , "ticket 2: boil water & get out the jar opener", "ticket 3: cook the pasta and sauce", "ticket 4: place the meal and serve".
Zero chance all 4 finished in the sprint, in fact they were rarely even all planned for same sprint.
It became impossible to express to users what they were getting at the end of each sprint. "OK, so you've.. purchased ingredients, when do I get to eat?"
This happened with multiple product managers, agile coaches and tech leads so it wasn't just a single person forcing stupidity on the process..
