Example data. Fieldnote is a fictional company used to fill all 61 boards, so the examples tell one consistent story.
Scale-up Fieldnote, first PI Planning with four teams (Field app, Office web, Integrations, Data) and the quarter objective: cut time-to-first-10-interventions from 14 days to 5.
What the team took away
Three red strings all point at dispatch API v2 in sprint 3; Office web moves it to sprint 2 and pushes SMS invites out one sprint. Confidence vote: 4 out of 5 on average.
How to run it
Preparation
Business owners, product management, every team with its PO and tech lead, architects, RTE. Block two full days, no parallel meetings.
Send the vision briefing, the top 10 features of the increment, and the architecture guardrails one week before. Teams read them before, not during.
Prepare the program board: sprints as columns, one row per team, one row for milestones. Print the capacity per team per sprint.
Book a breakout space per team plus the plenary room. Remote: one board per team plus the shared program board.
Agenda
180 min
Day 1 morning: context Business context by a business owner (20 min), product vision and top features by product management (45 min), architecture vision (30 min), planning rules and capacity (20 min). Questions after each block, not during.
240 min
Day 1 afternoon: team breakouts, draft 1 Each team drafts its sprint plan, writes PI objectives, and posts features and dependencies on the program board. Scrum masters walk between teams to flag conflicts early.
60 min
Day 1 close: draft review Each team presents its draft in 5 minutes: objectives, risks, dependencies. Business owners note what they will challenge tomorrow.
210 min
Day 2 morning: adjustments, draft 2 Management shares overnight decisions on scope and capacity. Teams rework their plans and resolve dependencies face to face with the other team, not by proxy.
90 min
Day 2 afternoon: final plans and business value Each team presents its final plan. Business owners assign business value 1 to 10 to every PI objective, out loud, in front of the team.
60 min
Risks and confidence vote Every program risk is ROAMed: resolved, owned, accepted, mitigated. Then fist of five per team. Any team at 2 or below reworks its plan before leaving.
Pitfalls
Do not let the context morning drift past lunch. If presenters overrun, cut the architecture talk, not the breakout time.
Refuse features without a business owner in the room. A feature nobody will rate is a feature nobody wanted.
Do not skip the confidence vote because it is late. A plan the team does not believe in is not a plan, and you will pay for it in sprint 3.
Afterwards
PI objectives and the program board are the contract for the increment. The RTE keeps the board alive in the weekly sync; the Inspect & Adapt at the end of the PI closes the loop.