One of the first things I learned about Agile was that it is flexible and always welcomes change.
In my experience, requirements changed almost every single time, customer feedback arrived midway, and sometimes even a new idea suddenly became much more important than the original plan. But Agile always helped me to adapt to all these changes. And this was probably the biggest reason why Agile became so popular in modern software development.
I always thought plans were supposed to give you some sort of direction. So when I read that Agile was all about welcoming change, my brain was like… Huh… wait, then why even bother planning?
This sounded completely reasonable at first, and that’s exactly where I ended up believing that Agile means "I'll figure it out later." But that’s not what Agile is trying to help teams achieve.
So if Agile isn't against planning, then why does this misunderstanding even exist? Or honestly, what does Agile planning actually look like, if not “figure it out as you go”?
That's what this blog is actually all about.
If Agile Welcomes Change, Why Plan At All?
Before I talk about Agile, I will tell you a simple scenario which always happens to me, and might have happened to you as well.
When I plan a trip with my friends, I tend to decide things beforehand, like where we will go, how much budget we will need, where we will stay, and which places we will visit.
Creating that plan does not guarantee that everything will happen exactly as I expected. Every other time, or sometimes it feels like every single time, ticket prices increase before I even start booking. Sometimes, the place that I planned to visit gets temporarily shut down due to some XYZ reason. Also, nature does not work by my direction, which somehow always manages to ruin my plan and eventually my mood, but anyways.
These things do not make the plan useless. Due to the unexpected changes that can happen later, I would not stop planning altogether. In fact, the reason I plan is because I do not want to get lost when those unexpected changes happen. A plan gives me a starting direction and helps me get going.
Basically, I'm trying to make a very simple point here — having a plan does not eliminate uncertainty. But uncertainty does not make planning pointless.
Even though planning and change can live together in everyday situations like a trip, many people still believe Agile and planning cannot coexist.
And this myth has a very specific origin.
Where The "Agile Means No Planning" Myth Comes From
For me, the answer started while I was going through a document called the Agile Manifesto.
The Agile Manifesto is a foundational document created by a group of software developers. It introduced four core values and twelve guiding principles that helped shape modern Agile practices.
One of its most well-known values is:
Responding to Change Over Following a Plan
The first time when I read that statement, I paused for a moment. Responding to Change Over Following a Plan. Hmm… Interesting. My immediate reaction was something like: "Wait a minute. Is Agile basically telling teams not to plan?"
And honestly, I can see why this statement confuses so many beginners. After all, if responding to change is considered more important than following a plan, then doesn't that make planning less valuable? At least that's what I thought.
Without even realizing it, my brain interpreted the statement into something completely different.
"Plans are useless."
"Things will change anyway."
"Let's just figure things out as we go."
Looking back, this is exactly where my misunderstanding started. But after spending more time understanding Agile, I realized that the statement was never trying to communicate any of those things. The problem wasn't Agile itself. The problem was and still is how the message often gets interpreted.
Once the statement is looked at through the lens of “planning doesn't matter”, it becomes very easy to assume that planning is unnecessary in Agile. It's easy to imagine a team simply starting the work and figuring everything out along the way. But software development rarely works as smoothly as assumptions do.
The moment multiple people, deadlines, and changing requirements enter the picture, assumptions fall apart. And this is not something random, I've actually experienced it. That's when the gap between assumptions and reality becomes much easier to notice.
What Happens When Teams Truly Stop Planning
Recently, me and my team were building a financial dashboard application for managing personal finances. We planned to develop features like user registration, dashboard components, transaction form, account creation form, and many more.
We started developing immediately without first deciding what to build first and what mattered the most. One of us jumped straight into the account creation form. I think someone else was into the transaction form. And I guess, someone was busy tweaking the UI. But anyways, the core personal financial dashboard functionality was still incomplete.
At first, this didn’t even look like a problem. We all were busy doing some sort of work. But when I looked closely, I understood that was exactly the issue. No matter how good our individual features were, but our users still couldn’t see any dashboard components for financial data analysis and management.
That’s when it hit us. If people can’t even do the one thing the app was supposed to let them do, then we're not building the right things. So we ended up spending lots and lots of our time building features that didn’t actually move the product forward. That’s when planning stopped feeling optional to us.
And I think that’s true for basically every software project, not just ours. Writing code matters. Building features matters. But knowing what to build first? That matters just as much.
Without that clarity, it’s easy to lose sight of what you’re trying to build — exactly what happened to us.
Agile Never Removed Planning — It Removed Excessive Planning
When I first started learning Agile, I assumed that being flexible meant constantly expanding the plan whenever a new idea appeared.
While building one of my projects called imaginAI, an AI image generation SaaS app, I spent a lot of time thinking about features before the product was even ready. The original idea was fairly simple. Users would enter a text prompt and generate images. I had already planned things like the landing page, image generation workflow, and payment integration.
But as development progressed, new ideas kept appearing — credit-based system and custom authentication mechanism. None of these were bad ideas. Some of them would eventually become useful additions to the product.
The problem was that I started focusing on those ideas before delivering the primary objective of the product itself. Instead of moving closer to a usable product, I was continuously expanding the scope of what needed to be built.
And that's when I learned an important lesson.
I realized that Agile was never against planning. I needed a plan, otherwise I wouldn’t know what I was building and why. What it actually pushed back against was the type of plan I was doing — one that kept growing instead of helping me start. I didn’t need a perfect plan for imaginAI. I needed enough of a plan to actually start, and the rest could be dealt with later.
Once I recognized that, I stopped treating every new idea as something that needed immediate attention. Some ideas could wait. The primary objective could not.
Since then, that small shift completely changed the way I approach every project.
The Different Kinds of Planning Happening Inside Agile Teams
By this point, I understood two things — removing planning creates problems, but Agile isn’t trying to eliminate it either.
When I was working on imaginAI, one mistake I initially made was thinking that planning happened only at the beginning of the project. I believed that once I had noted down the requirements and technical specifications, the planning phase was done. But as development progressed, I realized that planning was happening much more frequently than I originally thought.
I had a list of ideas and features I wanted to include in the product before starting the development. This included image generation, payment integration, a credit-based system, custom authentication, testimonials, example prompts, and several other ideas. In Agile, this kind of list has a name… the Product Backlog. It’s basically a master list of everything that might eventually become part of the product.
Having that list didn’t mean I had to build all of it right away. So before starting, I sat down and picked a handful of things to focus on for the first stretch. They were getting the core image generation flow working and a basic landing page up, nothing else. Turns out, that’s basically what Agile calls Sprint Planning. Instead of trying to build everything at once, I just picked a smaller set of work and focused on finishing that first.
While I was working on the first chunk of work, I started thinking about the future, like when I actually would put imaginAI in front of real users, and what absolutely needed to exist before releasing it. In Agile, that kind of bigger-picture thinking is often called Release Planning.
And even after a feature was ready, planning still didn't stop. After wrapping up the credit system, I still remember sitting back and thinking about what had worked smoothly and what hadn’t.
In a real team, this is the kind of thing that happens together, right after a sprint… everyone sitting down, talking through what worked and what didn’t, deciding what to do differently next time. I didn’t know it at that time, but that’s basically a Retrospective in Agile.
I noticed something kind of wild. And honestly, planning was happening before development started, during development, and even after the work was completed.
The simple difference which opened my eyes was that Agile does not treat planning as a one-time event. It treats planning as an ongoing activity that evolves alongside the product itself.
How Agile Plans Differ From Traditional Planning
Before I even started learning Agile, I was already familiar with several traditional software development approaches such as the Waterfall Model, V-Model, Spiral Model, and Iterative Development.
One thing I noticed across many traditional approaches was that a significant amount of planning happened right at the beginning. Teams would gather requirements, create detailed specifications, finalize designs, and only then move into development.
That’s actually why I started out planning everything upfront while building imaginAI. I had the database schema, the page flow, and most of the UI structure mapped out before writing a single line of code. I assumed that if I could define everything clearly at the beginning, development would become easier later on. At that time, nothing about that felt wrong to me.
Things got harder when I decided midway that I wanted users to revisit their own creations and be able to save them as well. This was something I hadn’t planned for in the original schema. Because I’d built everything around the earlier structure, this one idea meant going back and reworking decisions I thought were already final.
But once I understood Agile properly, I realized it approaches planning completely differently. Instead of planning the entire journey in detail before development even begins, Agile breaks things into smaller increments called Sprints. I could still define goals and make plans for imaginAI. But instead of locking everything in advance, I’d revisit and refine them as I go.
Here, I’m trying to keep a very simple and clear point. Both approaches involve planning. The difference is how each treats planning. One treats it as something that mostly happens before the work, while the other treats it as something that continues alongside the work.
And that's why Agile teams can remain flexible without feeling directionless.
So What Happens When The Plan Changes?
One thing I struggled to understand when I first started learning Agile was what teams were supposed to do when the original plan stopped making sense. For a long time, I assumed that if a plan needed to change, it meant that the planning was wrong in the first place.
That assumption got challenged pretty directly while working on SpendSense. When I was trying to show the app to a few potential users, most of them asked one simple question before even looking at the features or the UI — "Will I be able to see how much budget I have left for the month?"
And… I was like... Huh… Completely blank at that moment. This wasn't something I had planned for. It wasn't even sitting in my Parking Lot section. Account balances, transaction history, dashboard charts were the features I had built the app around. Suddenly they weren't what users actually cared about most.
The plan had changed. Now, I was left with pretty much only two options. I could either continue following the original plan simply because I had finalized it earlier, or I could listen to what users were actually telling me and update accordingly.
That was when my head started going in circles, not the song Circles… But anyways. I had planned carefully, I had made assumptions, I had finalized things. So if the plan now needed to change then surely I had planned wrong.
That's where I was misunderstanding something important about Agile. Changing a plan doesn't mean the planning failed. It means I know something today that I didn't know when I made the plan. My assumptions weren't wrong. They were just incomplete. And that's not a planning failure. That's just how building products actually works.
The goal never changed. What changed was the path to get there. And that's exactly why Agile treats plans as something to revisit, not something to protect.
If there's one thing Agile changed for me, it was the way I think about planning.
Earlier, I used to believe that a good plan was one that anticipated everything in advance. The more detailed the plan was, the more confident I felt before starting development.
But over time, I realized that software development does not work that way. Pretty much every time, something changes. Sometimes even the problem which I was trying to solve changed. This made me understand that no amount of upfront planning can completely eliminate that uncertainty.
Umm… not every project goes this way, honestly. Sometimes upfront planning works out just fine and nothing major changes. But in my experience, that's more the exception than the rule, especially when real users get involved.
What Agile actually taught me was that planning and flexibility are not opposites. In fact, I think having a plan is exactly what makes flexibility possible. Because without some direction, you're not being flexible, you're just being lost.
The goal is not to predict every possible situation before writing a single line of code. The goal is to know what you're building and why. And whenever better information becomes available, update the plan. That's not a failure. That's the point.
Looking back, the biggest lesson for me wasn't that Agile welcomes change. It was understanding that Agile welcomes change without losing direction.
And that's a very different thing from simply saying — "We'll figure it out later."