Let me give you the number nobody talks about out loud.
100 people in a room for 2 days. Average fully-loaded cost per person: $800–$1,200/day. That’s $160,000–$240,000 of company time. Every single quarter.
And for UX/UI teams? It’s often even worse than that.
The dirty secret of PI Planning
PI Planning was designed to align engineering teams around delivery commitments. Dependencies. Capacity. Sprint objectives. That makes sense — for engineers.
But UX/UI designers don’t work that way.
Design is not a sprint-sized activity. You can’t meaningfully commit to “final wireframes for Feature X” in a planning session when you haven’t talked to a single user yet. You can’t size research. You can’t predict what you’ll discover. The whole point of good design is that you don’t know what you’ll find until you look.
So what happens in most PI Planning events? Designers sit in a room for 16 hours, listen to engineering leads debate story points, and raise their hand twice.
UX teams in SAFe environments often find their goals and values aren’t fully appreciated — sometimes even seen as contrary to agile philosophy — with design capacity consumed by ceremonies that don’t reflect how design work actually flows. Agile Alliance
That’s not alignment. That’s expensive babysitting.
The real problem isn’t the meeting. It’s the model.
PI Planning assumes that all work can be planned the same way — top-down, on a fixed cadence, with upfront commitments. Even proponents of the format acknowledge that PI planning can be a useful stepping stone for lower-maturity agile implementations — which implies it’s a stepping stone, not the destination. Evogility
For UX, the mismatch is structural. SAFe’s approach essentially asks UX to deliver designs “just-in-time” — which forces reactive UX rather than the proactive discovery that actually produces good products. Toptal
When design is reactive, users feel it. Every time.
A better model for UX/UI in scaled agile
Here’s what high-performing design orgs are doing instead:
1. Dual-track participation UX works one full PI ahead of engineering. They attend a lightweight design sync at PI kickoff (2–4 hours, not 2 days) to understand upcoming features — then go do the discovery work engineering will need next quarter. Design informs planning. It doesn’t perform in it.
2. A UX representative at PI Planning — not the whole team One senior designer or design lead attends the full event to flag feasibility concerns, surface known UX constraints, and carry decisions back. The rest of the team stays out of the room and does actual work. This is how legal, finance, and security operate in most SAFe environments. UX should be no different.
3. Async pre-work replaces live speculation Before any planning event, circulate design readiness briefs per feature: what’s been researched, what’s still unknown, what can be committed vs. what needs a discovery spike. Pre-work distributed in advance is what separates mature agile orgs from ones still burning calendar on things that could have been a document. Agility at Scale
4. “Design confidence” as a planning input Instead of asking designers to commit to stories they can’t estimate, ask them to rate each planned feature: Ready / Needs discovery / Blocked. Engineering plans around design confidence. Not the other way around.
What you actually get back
When you pull UX/UI out of the full PI Planning event and give them a model that matches how design actually works:
→ You save 3–6 designer-days per quarter, per designer → You get research that’s 8–10 weeks ahead of build — not scrambled to catch up → You stop shipping interfaces that have to be redesigned after release → Your designers stop burning out from ceremony overload
The best UX isn’t produced in planning rooms. It’s produced when designers have the time and space to actually talk to users.
Give them that back.