Log in or create a free Rosenverse account to watch this video.
Log in Create free account100s of community videos are available to free members. Conference talks are generally available to Gold members.
SAFe or Sorry?
Summary
In his article for Forbes titled Understanding Fake Agile, Steve Denning refers to SAFe as “codified bureaucracy”. Jared Spool says it’s a “fast path to mediocrity”. But the Scaled Agile Framework (SAFe) is currently in use by many enterprise organizations like NASA, Capital One, FedEx, and the Department of Defense. With so many companies attempting to become as agile as Silicon Valley startups, SAFe is being adopted as a way to scale up Agile software development processes, and many UX teams are having to support it, whether they like it or not.
Key Insights
-
•
SAFe scales agile by organizing multiple agile teams into Agile Release Trains aligned on synchronized iteration schedules.
-
•
Lean UX is typically added to SAFe as an afterthought, creating a hybrid decentralized model where a UX Center of Excellence supports multiple teams.
-
•
Due to limited UX resources, embedding a UX person in every agile team is usually impossible; training team members and using design systems help alleviate this.
-
•
Program Increment (PI) Planning is a key SAFe event to visualize dependencies and align teams around shared work and schedules.
-
•
Working UX one or more iterations ahead of development is important to validate hypotheses but risks creating mini-waterfalls with handoffs.
-
•
Story pointing UX work alongside development stories can improve capacity planning and make UX effort visible to the teams.
-
•
Product Owner and Product Manager roles in SAFe can be confusing and sometimes reversed compared to other agile methodologies, causing role conflicts.
-
•
Smaller SAFe implementations (as low as 100-125 people) can still benefit from the framework, especially for managing inter-team dependencies.
-
•
Effective collaboration between UX, requirements analysts, and business analysts is crucial due to different focuses: user experience vs. business process.
-
•
A risk of SAFe is codified bureaucracy that may isolate agile teams from customers, potentially undermining true business agility.
Notable Quotes
"Each Agile Release Train is a long-lived team of agile teams that delivers solutions incrementally within a value stream."
"If something is not ready by the time the train leaves the station, then it catches the next train."
"There aren’t enough lean UX experts to collaborate with every team, so we create a lean UX Center of Excellence for each value stream."
"Our PI planning events are like 600 people strong, including representatives from across our 6,000 person company."
"Story pointing UX work would help us plan capacity and avoid being surprised by last minute discovery work."
"SAFe is very developer-centric and was originally designed for construction—the code production part of software."
"In SAFe, product owner and product manager roles are reversed from what some teams expect, which causes confusion."
"PI Planning really helps visualize dependencies between teams, which was invisible before."
"If the entire firm isn’t operating the same agile script, you won’t get the benefits of scaled agile."
"Steve Denning says SAFe is codified bureaucracy where the customer is almost totally absent."
Or choose a question:
More Videos
"Leadership is not about having all the answers, it’s about empowering others to own the strategy."
Jacqui FreyFlow and Superfluidity for Design Orgs
November 7, 2018
"A system is more than the sum of its parts; it exhibits adaptive, goal-seeking, self-preserving, sometimes evolutionary behavior."
Sheryl CababaExpanding your Design Lens with Systems Thinking
March 28, 2023
"When discovery is missing, teams might move fast, but often in the wrong direction."
Bianca JeffersonFrom Sprints to Systems: Operationalizing Continuous Discovery Through DesignOps
September 10, 2025
"The biggest struggle was recruiting and scheduling participants, so we started a shared Google sheet."
Liza Pemstein Jane DavisScaling Research Via an Ops First Model at Clever
March 27, 2023
"We must keep communication channels open and multiple — including anonymous ones — so people feel safe to speak up."
Brian MossWhat Does it Mean to be a Resilient Research Team?
March 9, 2022
"The behaviors act as a gauge, not a scorecard, to see who is struggling and who is thriving."
Johnny MichaelsenMeasure Behaviors, Not Results
April 23, 2026
"Please stop by the Rosenfeld Bookstore to check out signed books and brand new titles."
Bria Alexander Louis RosenfeldOpening Remarks Day 2
March 26, 2024
"I can tell when something is real when multiple teams are talking about it and planning together."
Dr. Nikki SmithResearch Strategy: Connecting Insights to Outcomes
March 12, 2025
"Keeping communication fluid with participants until the moderated session keeps them engaged and less likely to forget."
Roberta Dombrowski Lianna Aduana5 Reasons to Bring your Recruiting in House
September 30, 2021
