Preparing for Sprint Planning - Pre-Planning Best Practices
Our sprint planning meetings take 4+ hours because we're estimating and clarifying stories for the first time during the meeting. How much preparation should happen before sprint planning? Should stories already be estimated? What's the right balance?
Backlog refinement is essential - it's not optional. We dedicate 1 hour mid-sprint (Wednesday) to refining top 20 backlog stories: clarify requirements with PO, write acceptance criteria together, estimate with planning poker.
Sprint planning becomes a 90-minute story selection and commitment meeting instead of 4-hour requirements workshop. Rule: Stories entering sprint must be "ready" - estimated, AC written, dependencies identified, no open questions.
Definition of Ready checklist saves us: ✓ Story has clear title, ✓ Description with business value, ✓ Acceptance criteria, ✓ Estimate, ✓ Technical design (if complex), ✓ No blockers or dependencies.
PO reviews top 15 stories with tech lead 2 days before sprint planning. Any story not "ready" gets deferred. Sprint planning focuses on commitment and sprint goal, not requirements discovery. Cut our planning from 5hrs to 2hrs.
We do async pre-planning for distributed team: PO shares top 25 prioritized stories in Slack 3 days before planning, team asks clarifying questions async and does rough T-shirt estimates, we address concerns in 30min sync pre-planning meeting, then sprint planning is pure commitment discussion.
Cuts synchronous meeting time from 4hrs to 90min total. Respects time zones, gives introverts time to think, creates paper trail of decisions.
Controversial opinion: Don't estimate before sprint planning. Use the planning meeting for conversation AND estimation together - that collaborative discussion is where team learning and alignment happens.
Pre-estimating in refinement loses the valuable discussion when whole team is together. Yes, accept that sprint planning takes 3-4 hours. That's not waste if team emerges deeply aligned on what they're building and why. Meeting length is not the problem - lack of engagement is.