Three years with SAFe: this is what stands out
summary
Three years of running SAFe yields concrete changes not slogans: PI planning creates detailed, brittle commitments that block urgent work; switching to outcome-focused goals and OKRs frees teams to experiment; deliberately underfilling sprints—80% capacity, then 60%, then 50%—absorbs unplanned work and reduces stress; probe/sense/respond experiments (Barbie T‑shirt discounts) show a 25% sales uplift and validate hypotheses quickly; stop using story points for roadmaps, use historical cycle times (about 60 days in 80% of cases) for realistic promises and smoother flow.
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chapters (11)
- 0:00Introduction
- 8:49PI planning like chess vs. software
- 13:06Governance vs. team agility
- 17:48Unplanned work and detailed plans
- 21:19Objective key results and team collaboration
- 26:30Overloading teams hurts flow
- 30:22From feature factory to system thinking
- 33:11Removing dependencies
- 35:46Managers fix system problems
- 37:52John’s changes from scratch
- 40:19Final thoughts on SAFe
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