Michał Grześkowiak

I am a Scrum Master, Agile Coach, and Release Train Engineer (RTE), and I currently support agility in the broadest sense at Circle K.

For over 10 years, I’ve been helping organizations effectively scale Agile—I work with SAFe, LeSS, and Kanban in large, international environments. I started as a Product Owner, and later, as a Scrum Master and coach, I led distributed, multi-office teams. In 2019, at Agile by Example, I spoke about what really works (and what doesn’t work at all) in remote work.

What matters most to me are tangible results: building self-organizing, mature teams, improving flow at the ART level, and fostering honest, human collaboration in large-scale transformations.

Your PI Planning Is Probably Lying to You

Lessons from scaling Agile across multiple interdependent ARTs.

Most PI Plannings look successful on the surface: confident teams, packed boards, ambitious objectives, and aligned leadership. But a few iterations later, reality hits: priorities shift, dependencies explode, teams overload themselves, and predictability collapses.

In our large-scale environment, we realized that PI Planning was often optimizing for confidence and alignment theater rather than delivery reality. Teams planned more work than their actual throughput allowed, critical dependencies were discovered too late, and “everything is a priority” slowly turned planning into organizational fiction.

We want to share the uncomfortable lessons we learned while scaling Agile across multiple interdependent ARTs and workstreams. We will explore how overcommitment, dependency complexity, and optimism-driven planning quietly destroy predictability and what changed when we finally confronted the problem with data.

This is not a SAFe success story. It is a story about restoring trust in planning through flow metrics, readiness gates, WIP limits, dependency visualization, and brutally honest conversations about delivery reality.

Michał will be speaking with Paweł Pietruszka.