“Adopting SAFe has been an incredible and proud journey for us. The collective commitment and determination from leadership to Agile teams enabled us to overcome periods of uncertainty and challenges, leading to our first significant achievements. By bridging the gap between the business and technical worlds and fostering alignment across the entire organization, SAFe has proven to be an indispensable framework… for sustainable growth and long-term success.”
— Trang Duong, COO of Mobio
Overview
Mobio offers an all-in-one Customer Relationship Management (CRM) and Customer Data Platform (CDP) that serves more than 50 organizations worldwide. They pride themselves on being more than just a technology provider. They are a strategic partner assisting in digital transformations. Mobio’s goal is to empower marketing, sales, and service teams to work in harmony and build deeper customer relationships–all from a single, unified platform. Read on to learn more about how Mobio was able to align business and technical teams with the Scaled Agile Framework.
The Challenge: Finding Alignment Between Business and Technical
The greatest challenge Mobio faced before transitioning to SAFe was the lack of alignment between the business world and the technical world. Business objectives and customer pain points could not effectively reach the product development teams due to a missing feedback loop, which resulted in outputs lacking empathy and difficulties for users in adoption.
At the same time, as our product grew into a more comprehensive solution, the fragmentation among Agile teams and between different solution components became increasingly evident, making integration and scale-up efforts highly challenging.
Previously, Mobio had applied Scrum, which was suitable in the early stage when the product scale was small and focused on a single product line. However, as Mobio expanded into three parallel product lines with strong interdependencies, Scrum began to show its limitations. Overlaps in collaboration created difficulties in maintaining alignment, transparency, and ensuring both speed and quality — critical factors for the company’s long-term goals.
These challenges ultimately drove Mobio to adopt SAFe — a framework designed to scale, orchestrate cross-team and multi-product collaboration, while preserving agility. With SAFe, Mobio has been able to establish a synchronized and sustainable development process, bringing our solutions closer to customers.
Why use SAFe?
When facing these challenges, Mobio’s leadership team proactively sought solutions and explored several methodologies and frameworks, including Scrum of Scrums, LeSS, and Scaled Agile. After carefully comparing the strengths and weaknesses of each, Mobio chose SAFe for these key reasons:
- First, when mapping against their biggest pain point, Mobio recognized that SAFe’s mindset, core values, and principles are oriented toward outcomes rather than outputs. This ensures top-down strategic alignment, connecting the objectives of the entire organization with each Agile team’s objectives.
- Second, SAFe strongly supports customer-centricity and the economic view at every level and role across the enterprise.
- Third, while the framework is inherently complex, this very characteristic brings clarity in roles and responsibilities, along with detailed guidance on how the system should operate. This makes communication, training, and implementation significantly more effective.
- Above all, SAFe is designed for building complex solutions with a product-development mindset, rather than just creating simple tools within a project-based approach. “This is precisely what we were looking for, and so far, it has proven to be the right decision,” says Duong.
Results and Business Outcomes with SAFe
Since implementing SAFe, Mobio has observed significant improvements across process, Agile teams, and business outcomes:
How SAFe led to process improvements and helped teams align:
Thanks to PI Planning, IT Planning, and regular sync sessions, transparency and collaboration among Agile teams have been markedly enhanced.
Backlogs, progress, and risks are now better managed, with survey results averaging 4/5.
Although PI Objective completion rates fluctuated in some periods, the overall trend has improved due to better dependency identification and stronger delivery discipline. Average completion rates increased from 60% to 82%.
Predictability rose from 65% to 85%, making product planning and releases more accurate.
Agile team performance:
- Teams are more seamlessly connected through Agile Release Trains (ARTs) and PI Objectives.
- Survey results show that most members feel their daily work directly contributes to the company’s overall goals.
- Team responsibility and cohesion improved significantly, with average scores rising from 3.4/5 before SAFe to 4.1/5.
- Blocker resolution time was reduced from 2 days to 0.5–1 day.
- Team satisfaction increased by 15–20% after 4 PIs, reflecting higher ownership and stronger team engagement.
Achieving business and customer outcomes with SAFe:
- Release cycles are now consistently maintained every two weeks, delivering value to customers faster.
- Bug counts decreased by over 30% after 4 PIs, demonstrating continuous product quality improvements.
- The ratio of post-release bugs to total development bugs dropped from 8% to 3%, making the product more stable and reducing customer issues after releases.
- The percentage of features delivering measurable business value rose from 75% to 90%, showing clear improvement in prioritization and feature selection.
Beyond Business: How SAFe Improved Company Culture
“Beyond the business benefits, what impressed us most about adopting SAFe were the positive impacts on people and culture at Mobio. SAFe’s mindset naturally aligns with and reinforces the core values Mobio embraces even before adopting SAFe: Ownership, Respect, and Growth-Oriented.” -– Trang Duong, COO of Mobio
Through SAFe practices that connect daily work with ultimate outcomes, every team member now experiences greater clarity, meaning, and ownership in their roles, Mobio reports. The company culture has become more open and transparent, as SAFe events encourage participation, facilitation, and the sharing of fresh ideas and perspectives. This has fostered stronger collaboration, mutual support, and alignment toward common goals.
At the same time, a culture of continuous learning and improvement has taken root, enabling the organization to become more proactive, cohesive, and mature with each Sprint and PI. Most importantly, individuals feel their voices are heard, team cohesion has grown, and satisfaction with the work environment has improved significantly — with survey scores rising from an average of 4/5 to 5/5.
In summary, SAFe has helped Mobio become more transparent, aligned, and adaptive in delivering value to customers. This has built a strong foundation for scaling Agile further and achieving even greater business results in the future.
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