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
"We all say empathy is foundational for good design, yet contemporary research often remains oddly distant from real human experience."
Daniel GloydDesigning From the Inside Out: How Method Acting Can Inspire Design Research
February 12, 2026
"Recruiting for indigenous participants via Craigslist missed the unique role community ties play, so we regrouped and connected through community organizations."
Deirdre Hirschtritt Cesar Paredes Marie PerrotResearch is Only as Good as the Relationships You Build
November 17, 2022
"It was like giving a map that you could not read or even understand."
Benjamin RealMaturity Models: A Core Tool for Creating a DesignOps Strategy
October 1, 2021
"What is your theory of change? How are you actually going to achieve the outcome you’re aiming for?"
Max Gadney Andrea Petrucci Joshua Stehr Hannah WickesAssessing UX jobs for impact in climate
August 14, 2024
"Seb said his function supports the function that supports the main business – making his work twice removed."
Lada GorlenkoTheme 1: Intro
January 8, 2024
"C-FRE stands for curiosity, freedom, reframing, exploration, and engagement—the soft qualities we tend to overlook in play."
Feyikemi AkinwolemiwaPlay to innovate: How curiosity and experimentation transform UX
March 11, 2026
"Cohorts are a super duper fun way to engage with more of our community."
Bria AlexanderOpening Remarks
March 29, 2023
"Synthetic duplicates living on after data deletion raise ethical questions about users’ right to be forgotten."
Llewyn Paine[Demo] Deploying AI doppelgangers to de-identify user research recordings
June 5, 2024
"Celebrate progress continuously and use OKRs as a learning process to evolve goals and strategies."
Bria Alexander Benson Low Natalya Pemberton Stephanie GoldthorpeOKRs—Helpful or Harmful?
January 20, 2022
