what we build · part five
Planning
The story map. The walking skeleton. INVEST as a story-shape diagnostic. What kanban replaces. The phase where the team makes value visible — and where excessive planning becomes its own substitution failure.
Events in this phase. Mapping session — half a day with the trio plus stakeholders, repeated as needed. Output: the map in Miro, releases drawn as horizontal stripes, the walking skeleton named. Daily is where the map is consulted for what flows next. There is no separate weekly planning meeting.
What planning is — and what it isn't
Planning is the phase where the team makes value visible. It is also the phase where excessive planning becomes its own substitution failure. A team that plans too much produces a plan that looks like the work but isn't. A team that plans too little produces flow without direction. The right amount of planning is the amount that lets the team see what's next, and why, without locking in commitments that future learning will overturn.
The discipline this volume describes is light. The story map is the artifact. The walking skeleton is the value question. INVEST is the shape diagnostic. Kanban is what replaces the heavy planning meetings most teams default to. Together these four practices do all the work — and importantly, they do it visibly, on a wall everyone can see, not in slide decks reviewed once a quarter.
If the plan is doing real work, you can point at it. If you can't point at it, you don't have a plan — you have a meeting.
This part has four sections. The map. The walking skeleton. INVEST and story shape. What kanban replaces. Each is a discipline the team uses; together they are the planning practice.