Insights on Scaling Agile with SAFe: Challenges and Benefits from a Senior Practitioner

Scaling agile transformation is never easy; while coordinating 1‑2 teams is manageable with simple Scrum of Scrums, involving multiple teams introduces numerous challenges such as aligning direction, planning across iterations, maintaining delivery rhythm, continuous integration, dependency management, risk reduction, and avoiding local optimizations.

These issues must be addressed, and large‑scale agile must be safe (SAFe). To explore how, we interviewed a seasoned agile practitioner.

Even, a current technical product manager with over 10 years of R&D experience, previously served as a Scrum Master and now acts as a PO within an Agile Release Train (ART) comprising dozens of teams.

He describes the organization’s scale: a single ART with ten‑plus teams, each PO typically overseeing two teams, and the challenges of coordinating such a large group.

Key pain points before SAFe included: adding people without increasing productivity; questioning whether to chase epic completion rates; and difficulties in organizing front‑end and testing teams within a platform‑centric environment.

Reasons large organizations choose SAFe: it fits platform‑type products with roles like Scrum, PI, Release Train, PO, and Product Manager; it offers detailed implementation guidance; and its PI (10‑week) cadence suits large‑scale development.

Benefits observed after a year of SAFe: detailed rollout guidelines for each role; suitability for large agile teams; retention of Scrum for small iterations; the Release Train Engineer (RTE) role mirroring a traditional project manager; and Communities of Practice (CoP) that support continuous improvement across SA, PO, and front‑end teams.

SAFe 4.6 adds explicit support for enterprise DevOps, making “DevOps on‑demand release capability” one of the five core lean‑enterprise competencies.

For more SAFe DevOps knowledge, readers are invited to join the online discussion community and consider the SAFe‑certified Scaled Agile DevOps Professional (SDP) program.