What else do you want us to do for 4-6 hours/week? Write poetry?
Eventually every ticket just gets sized "medium-big", and people keep their heads down with mouths closed.
Much could be accomplished more efficiently by getting product, management, and 1-2 seniors in a room for 30min to actually decide what/if plans have changed & cascade the changes accordingly.
99 times out of 100, the plan didn't change because something raised from the bottom, but because management has changed direction or users have asked for something new. Why subject 95% of the team to hour long monologues?
15% seems very excessive. Almost a whole day a week and two days lost of deep work. Try to aim for 1.5%.
How do people think Apple develops completely new product lines like the iPhone, iPad, watch, etc.
There's a lot more up front planning (and yes .. of course, course corrections) than a lot of agile advocates want to admit.
Most agile hyped up senior management I've met just use it as an excuse to be derelict in their ability to plan anything.
As I said, re-planning is more often than not needed because of technical challenges developers are running into. If one person is going to take 4 weeks to deliver something instead of the expected 2 days, lots of things may have to be rejiggered.
But also, yes even "real product driven company with a mature products" are changing plans every 1-2 weeks. Because each new incremental feature is a little project of its own. I never said plans get "upended" but they absolutely need to get re-adjusted ever 1-2 weeks based on both dev input and product/user reaction.
If you want to talk about the iPhone, just look up the history of how the software keyboard was developed. Talk about rapid prototyping and upending plans!
They absolutely plan where they want to be in 3-6 months -- they're generally quarterly OKR's -- but the only way they consistently achieve their targets is with weekly or biweekly readjustments.
The higher you go, the less agile it gets, because that's a horrible way to develop software, or any high-skill professional service or product.
I don’t know how you can get a team of developers to productively spend 39 hours and 24 minutes of keyboard time productively coding in the same direction with only 36 minutes of discussion.
It's the lesser tier, often non-tech companies doing this kind of micromanagement.
Yes, that's the point, that after each week (or two) of work, we've learned more and the plan already is outdated and needs to change.
> inputs likely aren't changing with that frequency
In my experience, they absolutely are unless you're building the simplest CRUD app that's identical to one you've built before. The inputs are less often changes from external stakeholders, and more often tasks that are turning out to be more difficult than hoped.
> and you aren't going to be able to pull in all the other stakeholders that often anyway
Of course you are. It's the PM's job to gather the new inputs, go check in with relevant stakeholders (takes a day or two at most), update or re-confirm their priorities, and then make the updated decisions for the next sprint.
In my experience, 15% of time spent each week on planning is about right. It doesn't maximize the productivity of each person coding, but it hugely maximizes the productivity of the whole team in delivering a valuable end result.