> My team spends 4 hours in sprint planning every week That seems excessive, but I don't know what area you work in. Does your team need to spend that long? I

> My team spends 4 hours in sprint planning every week That seems excessive, but I don't know what area you work in. Does your team need to spend that long? I have heard of that happening within Amazon, but then people vote with their feet and move to a team that doesn't spend four hours in sprint planning. > Many many folks inside Amazon say it has a startup culture. I've spent roughly as much of my career at startups as I have at Amazon. It's a bit of a mix bag. Having worked at start-ups that had to spend time doing undifferentiated work (just getting automated deployments, for example), it's in some ways nice not to deal with that, and yes, you have to follow The Process for that to be easy. I sometimes see people taking chances and acting quickly on new opportunities. But yes, I also see people not taking chances when the cost of doing so would have been small. Then again, I once worked for a start-up where you had to use a particular template for a design document, and you had to produce a project plan that 6-month long projects that was accurate to the hour. So... I think it's hard to make generalizations.