What I've seen is that most orgs, once they reach a certain size (100-200 people), start to spend a significant time planning. Part of this is human nature: onc

What I've seen is that most orgs, once they reach a certain size (100-200 people), start to spend a significant time planning. Part of this is human nature: once there are enough people, there will be managers, and plans are something managers show their hire ups to prove they're in control and doing a good job. But, I don't want to sound cynical, clearly planning is useful. I used to think that spending too much time on planning is a waste of time , but then I noticed that teams at Facebook also spend a lot of time at the beginning of each half (6 mo) doing planning. However, I wasn't able to pick up tricks or patterns that made FB good at this, other than obvious/useless things like all the people making the plans were really smart / domain experts. I did notice that the plans/planning process was very lose, there was no methodology, often the outcome was a bunch of bullet points. And they were very conscious about the value of the plan: they knew that if things go well and they move quickly, probably a lot of things will change in 3-4 months, and they will diverge from the plan. The value is thinking things through, agreeing on goals, spinning up teams, building things (eg. dashboards) to track progress, etc. Another story about the value of planning: at another company we hired a manager, and one of the things this guy did was introduce Capacity Planning. At the core it's a simple thing: make a big matrix, where the rows are the projects people want to work on, and the columns are the available people/teams. Collect all the projects, and make people put down their estimates for each (requires X time from team Y, etc). The value is, it's a very explicit way to show what people want to work on, obviously it will be more than you can actually do. So then you can make a very explicit choice about what you're doing and what you're not doing in the next X months. Back when we did this, there was an interesting insight the first time around: since we could count man days, we learned we're spending iirc ~70% of our time keeping the lights on (infra, etc), and only ~30% working on new things. But despite this insight, I thought it's a waste of time, it's too slow/formal/sluggish. But then I saw FB also spends significant time on planning (although it's much less formal, because they can get away with it, for a long list of reasons), so I thought okay, spending time planning is probably the way to go. Then I went to a company which was suffering from a focus problem. Every 2 weeks they'd have a prioritization meeting, where projects would get re-prioritized, which leads to obvious problems. Here I realized, for this problem, Capacity Planning would be a good thing, because one of the things it gets you is a long(er) term commitment to certain projects. Overall, my takeaway is to spend 10-20% of time on planning and related meta-activities. Be conscious that the value is in thinking things through etc, and the actual path may diverge, but that's okay. Depending on the culture, there are a number of things that planning gives you, eg. a commitment to work on X for Y time. Make metrics and dashboards to track things, but don't overdo it.