One lesson I learned, having run this same exercise now for multiple teams in our organization, is to use an icebreaker to prime the mindset of the participants. Start the session by having each person write just one thing he or she did between waking up and getting to work. Then ask each person to answer the question: “Why did you take that action?” I found that this starts a background mental thread that shows up in later planning sessions: “What is the value of this user story? Why would our users do this?”
