Reflections on a couple of years with SAFe

I’ve been meaning to write about my experience from the last couple of years, as a design leader in the middle of an Agile transformation. In this case my company adopted SAFe. Any large scale transformation of that nature is challenging, but for UX and Product Design it meant additional struggles.

I’m a big believer in sharing stories, the trials, false starts, experiments and occasional successes so that we can learn from each other. Outside of the annual conference (actually a very good resource for SAFe noobs), I’ve found very few accounts of SAFe implementations.

There’s a thousand articles about design craft and best practices but little in the way of practical models that can apply to a framework like SAFe. I guess it’s pretty hard and we are still discovering what works.

So I’ll share a few things on here, some more bite sized items on Twitter, and look foreword to a good conversation. I’m also on the design leaders Slack offered by Invision if you want to talk there. At the very least I hope to provide some helpful fodder for the next design manager googling “why are designers missing in SAFe?”