Quarterly Planning is an important ceremony for many agile groups since it helps creates alignment within a team and organization by creating short term targets for everyone to rally around. This ceremony can be especially important when you have many teams working towards the same objectives since it requires coordinating schedules and creating goals within each team that drive toward the same mission. As product owners and managers, it is our responsibility to bring the customers’ perspective into planning events to ensure that the right work is being prioritized. But gaining alignment and helping our teams develop and execute these plans can be challenging, which means we have a lot of work to do in pre-planning and during planning events to help make things successful. In this talk, we will be covering the key activities around PI Planning plus some of the best lessons we’ve learned from coordinating actions around risks and dependencies to facilitating prioritization conversations to communicating how team goals contribute to business objectives.

All products have defects, and our response to those defects has a huge impact on how our customers perceive the quality of our products. For larger release trains, it can be hard to have the full stack knowledge needed to be able to fix any defect reported by customers, and to make decisions about what defects are worth fixing. In this talk, we'll discuss how our defect management process has evolved from a dev-of-the-week approach to a dedicated defect team, how defects get triaged and distributed across the train plus the pros and cons of our current approach, and how we use a quarterly Bug Squish event to reduce our overall defect count.