The Sprint Planning Meeting is an important part of Scrum, our agile product development framework. You can read more about the purpose of the meeting online, e.g. on ScrumMethodology.com.
The main goals are is to finish prioritizing user stories, to talk about their details, and for the teams to commit to delivering a certain set of user stories in the coming sprint. Formally, we call this moving the stories from the big, all-encompassing Product Backlog, to the specific, locked-down Sprint Backlog.
At HubSpot, we do this almost entirely by the book. In reality, we do much of the prioritization before this meeting. The product owner(s) gets feedback from business stakeholders as well as developers to help estimate and prioritize all the user stories. We also play a game of Planning Poker the day before the sprint planning meeting, to help us come up with better estimates.
Nonetheless, we do some detailed task creation and analysis during this meeting, and we definitely do the public commitment of what we'll deliver to the rest of the company. This creates a powerful internal drive to deliver.
Below are some pictures from today's sprint planning process. They are shared just for fun, not because they're particularly informative.
If you use Scrum, how do you do your planning meetings? Have you diverged a lot from the basic Scrum framework, and if so, how / why?