Whatever you are trying to accomplish as a team, you need some things. You need to know what you intend to build. Depending on whether you're trying to create

Whatever you are trying to accomplish as a team, you need some things. You need to know what you intend to build. Depending on whether you're trying to create a new market or compete in a large field, you might have a clear picture of the end result, or a lot of ideas you need to try out. Where you fall on that spectrum should tell you how far you're allowed to plan in advance. Rarely do you need to change what you're building on a timeline as short as a week, but of course that can happen, too. But given that planning and meetings require time, and rework also requires time, you need to find a balance that works for your team size and the above allowance of planning based on volatility of your goals. Someone has to be able to make decisions. Often those decisions are high-level - what is the market value of the thing you are building, and how many resources are you willing to allocate. We know in software that estimation is hard and we will get it wrong, so that's always going to be a thorn in the side of the decision-makers, and some of them will always try to offload that responsibility back on us anyway. Still, at some point it is reasonable to relay how well things are going back up the chain. You need to be able to share plans, decisions, constraints and a swath of other information among team members. Some of it will be for builders. Some will be for decision-makers. Team structure will probably dictate how important leadership and decision-making is compared to maker details. And that structure will hopefully flow from the kind of thing you're building, whether it's just an idea, or something that has to be done a particular way against a particular cost profile to ensure it's worth doing at all. There's plenty of room in all of this for ambiguity, for conflict, for human errors, for ego. For prioritizing the wrong thing (whether that's the thing to work on, or the thing to measure, or how much of a stink you make about mistakes.) Given all of the above, what I don't like about Agile is the tendency to put off figuring out how you're going to build things until the last minute, and in the middle of figuring those things out, you change what you're going to build. If you're building out ideas and moving fast and breaking things, then that pain I just described is something you have to accept as one of the costs of being a pioneer. In so many cases I've seen, you're not being a pioneer, so if you spend a bit more time on planning, you'll figure out what to build and how to build it, and then each member of the team will buckle down and focus on the details required to do to the building. Focus, and less volatility. That's what I want out of the process in play for accomplishing something. I think the decision-makers mostly don't want to be caught out making a bad decision, such as spending resources to build something only to find that the value isn't there - either because of the market, or the unknowns in resource cost.