Sprint planning used to eat our Wednesday mornings alive. For a 6-person team, we were consistently spending 3–4 hours just to scope and assign a two-week sprint — ticket by ticket, estimation poker, re-reading half-written Jira descriptions, relitigating scope that should've been settled in refinement. Last quarter, I ran an experiment to fix it. The result cut that meeting to under 90 minutes.
The Problem (Specific)
Our tickets came into planning half-baked. Engineers were reading acceptance criteria cold, asking clarifying questions that burned 10 minutes per story, and pointing wildly because nobody had a shared mental model of the work. The PM wrote the tickets; the engineers read them for the first time in the meeting. Classic.
The Experiment
I started pre-processing every ticket the night before planning with a single prompt pattern. Here's the actual prompt I used:
