SAFe: A Waterfall Pig with Agile Lipstick
SAFe is the antithesis of what a strong product company would use. It is so called ‘Agile at scale’. It isn’t Agile. It’s just Marketing.
Update: This article is now featured in: https://safedelusion.com/
“So many large companies get addicted to the process, and they think the answer is process… Even though they might use the word agile they often use these ridiculous processes like SAFe or LeSS. These are the antithesis of what a good product company would use. In fact I cannot point to a single strong product company that uses any of those. They’re so called Agile at Scale. They’re not Agile at all. It’s just marketing, and all these people fell for the marketing pitch
— Marty Cagan, 2022
Marty Cagan is the Founder and Partner of the Silicon Valley product Group (SPVG) and author of bestselling books INSPIRED and EMPOWERED. Marty — Who has 20 years of industry experience as a product leader — now works with technology companies from across the globe to help them drive product transformation with innovation, speed, and agility. He is often referred to as the ‘most influential person in the product space’.
TLDR;
Modern agile methodologies bring in complex systems to track if a team is completing the work they committed to at the PI level. Without proper product management strategy (as this cannot happen a few days per quarter) engineers spend huge amounts of time lying about their estimates, underpromising, and attempting to gamify common metrics. This causes huge motivational issues with engineers. Self Efficacy which is part of an established psychological well being model (Zimmerman’s model explaining self regulation) is the belief you can do something and the motivation around it. If your timelines and estimates don’t make sense and you spend too long lying about it then you can’t build belief structures or motivation around doing it, which then impacts your interest to even try and do it.
What is SAFe?
The Scaled Agile Framework® (SAFe®) is a set of organizational and workflow patterns for…
