PI Planning Preparation
What “ready” means before PI Planning
Preparation is where PI Planning is won. Product Management runs the Pre-PI Planning event with the RTE and stakeholders, and prepares the vision briefing, the top-ranked Features with benefit hypotheses and acceptance criteria, and an initial roadmap view. Product Owners refine and size the Team Backlog against the team's capacity (not velocity) - enough stories to keep every iteration full, including room for the Innovation and Planning iteration - and identify dependencies and risks in advance.
POs also draft PI Objectives and review them with the team; the draft is a starting point only. Objectives are finalized at PI Planning, and business value is assigned by the Business Owners. Teams contribute to the ART Planning Board (physical or virtual) with draft iterations, dependencies, and milestones.
Rule of thumb
If a story can't be estimated and demoed, it isn't ready for PI Planning. Bring roughly 1.5x capacity of refined stories, not 3x - excess inventory hides the real constraint.
Traps
Doing the team's iteration planning for them (POs bring content, not a finished plan); skipping Pre-PI Planning when teams are distributed or suppliers are involved; treating draft PI Objectives as commitments; forgetting architectural runway and enabler inputs from the System Architect; planning at 100% capacity with no buffer.
Worked example
A team with 40 person-days of capacity in the PI brings 55–60 points of refined stories, three named dependencies on another team, and two draft objectives. In planning, half the stories change - that's expected. Preparation bought speed, not certainty.