Is SAFe the right tool for Agile? (Spoilers: nope)

Product leaders need to be like Batman: have a toolbelt with different tools and solutions for different business challenges.

What's the link between Batman and this comic on SAFe?

It has everything to do with using the right tool for the right job.

If you know what, how and when you want to build a product and you're not willing to change or adapt for your users/customers, don't do Agile, just do waterfall. SAFe is not the right tool for the job, you'll just keep doing your waterfall work by pretending you're Agile. If you just want to pretend and do Fake Agile, why not just keep doing Waterfall and tell people you do Agile anyway? It'll be cheaper and less traumatic for your teams.

If you decide to implement SAFe, you'll be able to tell everyone your company is Agile without even knowing what that means. Your teams will be stressed out and confused, having to navigate through a convoluted set of processes that were designed for top-down decisions and to maintain control in a few hands, while taking away a team's autonomy and capacity to build and iterate on what's best for the user - in order words, preventing the teams from doing actual Agile work.

As Steve Denning masterfully said?in a 2019 Forbes article, SAFe "gives the management a mandate to call themselves agile and keep doing what they have always done" and "the issue (...) is that if the firm is thinking about "scaling up agile", it is already on the wrong track. The challenge of genuine Agile is how to descale big monolithic, internally-focused systems into tasks that can be run by small self-managing customer-focused teams.”

If you kinda know what you want to build but don't know all the details and want to make sure you're building a product that will be used and loved by your customers, that's when Agile makes an enormous difference.

The true beauty of Agile happens when your teams have enough independence to self-manage and act fast on what they learn along the way, iterating and building products that are useful and delight users while delivering results to the business - Journey before Destination. It's what you learn through the journey that makes your product stand out. It's how you adapt to data and user feedback that brings the so-desired agility that some companies look for.

It's the gap that SAFe has: the customer is just a small piece of a giant, convoluted puzzle of unneeded complexity. It also goes in a different direction from some of the principles under the Agile Manifesto, mainly:

Individuals and interactions over processes and tools

Responding to change over following a plan

If a company implements SAFe as is, most likely after paying an indecent sum of money to some consulting firm that is now making bank, it's very unlikely they'll reap any benefits of moving to "Agile".

One of the main reasons for that is how slow?Agile Release Trains (ARTs)?are. How can you consider yourself Agile if you're deciding today what is going to be built 3-6 months from now? How can you react to any learnings from real-world usage of your product in any meaningful way when you have chartered a roadmap that cannot be deviated from? 6-10 sprints on an ART is an eternity in today's software development world. This is a good way to maintain the status quo and just do Business as Usual, which is?safe. This is not a good way to innovate and lead the way; ChatGPT was not a thing a few months ago. Crypto/Web3 came and went by way faster than that.

Your company is not benefiting from Agile in any shape or form by applying SAFe directly.

You may as well just keep using Waterfall. Less stress and ambiguity on your teams, less time lost forcing people to retrain and learn to follow a new framework to just get yourself to the same place you're currently in. You'll also save a lot of money, which in the current economy is not a bad thing. The right tool for the right job.

Now, does this mean that everything in SAFe is bad and should be ignored? Not at all. Again, the right tool for the right job. It never hurts to learn how to use as many tools as possible. Knowing how to use a tool and when to use a tool is one of the most important skills a Product Leader should have, no matter if you're a PM, PO, Scrum Master or whatever your role is called at your company.

Would I ever use or recommend someone to use SAFe as-is? Never. Nope. Not at all. Would I use parts of SAFe if I felt it was the right tool for the job? Absolutely.

Be like Batman.

For further reading on why SAFe is not Agile, I recommend the following article from David Pereira: Why SAFe is the safest choice to fail with Agile