Program Increment (PI) Planning is a two-day event in SAFe where all teams in an Agile Release Train come together to plan the next 8-12 weeks. It creates alignment, surfaces dependencies, and produces committed team objectives.
Enterprise organisations running multiple agile teams that need coordination. Less appropriate for small teams where Scrum or Kanban is sufficient.
- Leadership presents the vision and top features for the coming Program Increment
- Teams break into team planning sessions and plan their own sprints
- Teams identify risks and dependencies — surface them on a shared program board
- Teams draft PI Objectives and present to leadership
- Dependencies are negotiated and plans adjusted
- Teams commit to PI Objectives with a confidence vote
At Spotify's scale, coordination across 30+ squads requires PI-like alignment events. Quarterly 'Big Room Planning' sessions align all squads working on a given area — the Premium experience, Discovery, or the Creator platform — to shared quarterly goals, preventing squads from building conflicting solutions in parallel.
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- Turning PI Planning into a detailed Gantt chart — it should set direction and surface dependencies
- Skipping the dependency identification step — often the most valuable part of the event
- Running PI Planning for a team of 5 — the overhead doesn't justify the benefit at small scale
- SAFe Distilled — Knaster & Leffingwell