{"id":1196,"date":"2026-04-27T12:09:48","date_gmt":"2026-04-27T12:09:48","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/adhdux.com\/?p=1196"},"modified":"2026-04-16T12:21:06","modified_gmt":"2026-04-16T12:21:06","slug":"pi-planning-is-burning-your-budget-heres-a-better-way","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/adhdux.com\/?p=1196","title":{"rendered":"PI Planning is burning your budget. Here&#8217;s a better way."},"content":{"rendered":"\n<figure class=\"wp-block-video\"><video height=\"720\" style=\"aspect-ratio: 1280 \/ 720;\" width=\"1280\" autoplay controls muted src=\"https:\/\/adhdux.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/04\/PI_Planning_Burns_Budgets.mp4\" playsinline><\/video><\/figure>\n\n\n\n<p><a href=\"https:\/\/open.spotify.com\/episode\/6e6ASzBEkz13kHLWytlDcn?si=M-Ofy2-DRreicsZ76Y2n7A\">Spotify<\/a><\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>Let me give you the number nobody talks about out loud.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>100 people in a room for 2 days. Average fully-loaded cost per person: $800\u2013$1,200\/day. That&#8217;s <strong>$160,000\u2013$240,000<\/strong> of company time. Every single quarter.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>And for UX\/UI teams? It&#8217;s often even worse than that.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<hr class=\"wp-block-separator has-alpha-channel-opacity\"\/>\n\n\n\n<p><strong>The dirty secret of PI Planning<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>PI Planning was designed to align engineering teams around delivery commitments. Dependencies. Capacity. Sprint objectives. That makes sense \u2014 for engineers.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>But UX\/UI designers don&#8217;t work that way.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>Design is not a sprint-sized activity. You can&#8217;t meaningfully commit to &#8220;final wireframes for Feature X&#8221; in a planning session when you haven&#8217;t talked to a single user yet. You can&#8217;t size research. You can&#8217;t predict what you&#8217;ll discover. The whole point of good design is that you don&#8217;t know what you&#8217;ll find until you look.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>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.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>UX teams in SAFe environments often find their goals and values aren&#8217;t fully appreciated \u2014 sometimes even seen as contrary to agile philosophy \u2014 with design capacity consumed by ceremonies that don&#8217;t reflect how design work actually flows. <a href=\"https:\/\/agilealliance.org\/resources\/experience-reports\/user-experience-design-a-true-part-of-safe-or-a-patch\/\">Agile Alliance<\/a><\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>That&#8217;s not alignment. That&#8217;s expensive babysitting.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<hr class=\"wp-block-separator has-alpha-channel-opacity\"\/>\n\n\n\n<p><strong>The real problem isn&#8217;t the meeting. It&#8217;s the model.<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>PI Planning assumes that all work can be planned the same way \u2014 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 \u2014 which implies it&#8217;s a stepping stone, not the destination. <a href=\"https:\/\/evogility.com.au\/pi-planning-is-waste\/\">Evogility<\/a><\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>For UX, the mismatch is structural. SAFe&#8217;s approach essentially asks UX to deliver designs &#8220;just-in-time&#8221; \u2014 which forces reactive UX rather than the proactive discovery that actually produces good products. <a href=\"https:\/\/www.toptal.com\/product-managers\/agile\/agile-ux-design-explained\">Toptal<\/a><\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>When design is reactive, users feel it. Every time.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<hr class=\"wp-block-separator has-alpha-channel-opacity\"\/>\n\n\n\n<p><strong>A better model for UX\/UI in scaled agile<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>Here&#8217;s what high-performing design orgs are doing instead:<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p><strong>1. Dual-track participation<\/strong> UX works one full PI ahead of engineering. They attend a lightweight design sync at PI kickoff (2\u20134 hours, not 2 days) to understand upcoming features \u2014 then go do the discovery work engineering will need <em>next<\/em> quarter. Design informs planning. It doesn&#8217;t perform in it.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p><strong>2. A UX representative at PI Planning \u2014 not the whole team<\/strong> 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.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p><strong>3. Async pre-work replaces live speculation<\/strong> Before any planning event, circulate design readiness briefs per feature: what&#8217;s been researched, what&#8217;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. <a href=\"https:\/\/agility-at-scale.com\/safe\/pi-planning\/pi-planning-alternatives\/\">Agility at Scale<\/a><\/p>\n\n\n\n<p><strong>4. &#8220;Design confidence&#8221; as a planning input<\/strong> Instead of asking designers to commit to stories they can&#8217;t estimate, ask them to rate each planned feature: Ready \/ Needs discovery \/ Blocked. Engineering plans around design confidence. Not the other way around.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<hr class=\"wp-block-separator has-alpha-channel-opacity\"\/>\n\n\n\n<p><strong>What you actually get back<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>When you pull UX\/UI out of the full PI Planning event and give them a model that matches how design actually works:<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>\u2192 You save 3\u20136 designer-days per quarter, per designer \u2192 You get research that&#8217;s 8\u201310 weeks ahead of build \u2014 not scrambled to catch up \u2192 You stop shipping interfaces that have to be redesigned after release \u2192 Your designers stop burning out from ceremony overload<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>The best UX isn&#8217;t produced in planning rooms. It&#8217;s produced when designers have the time and space to actually talk to users.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>Give them that back.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Spotify 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\u2013$1,200\/day. That&#8217;s $160,000\u2013$240,000 of company time. Every single quarter. And for UX\/UI teams? It&#8217;s often even worse than that. The dirty secret of PI Planning PI Planning was designed to<\/p>\n<p><span class=\"more-wrapper\"><a class=\"more-link button\" href=\"https:\/\/adhdux.com\/?p=1196\">Continue reading<\/a><\/span><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[11,3,6,7],"class_list":["post-1196","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized","tag-design","tag-ux","tag-uxresearch","tag-uxstrategy"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/adhdux.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1196","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/adhdux.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/adhdux.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/adhdux.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/adhdux.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=1196"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/adhdux.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1196\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1198,"href":"https:\/\/adhdux.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1196\/revisions\/1198"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/adhdux.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=1196"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/adhdux.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=1196"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/adhdux.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=1196"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}