Virtually every large enterprise is exploring how they can use AI to gain a competitive advantage in the market. However, its potential for creating unintended consequences is equal to AI’s benefits.
When:
November 30, 2023, 10:00 am – November 30, 2023, 11:00 am MST
Where:
Zoom
Who:
Agile Coach, Consultant, Product Manager, Product Owner, Program or Project Manager, Release Train Engineer, Scrum Master
In this webinar, we will explore the crucial aspects of integrating AI responsibly in today’s products and learn how SAFe can help ensure your AI endeavors are transparent, fair, and safeguarded.
• Compliance & Regulation: Understand the critical regulatory landscapes governing AI and how to navigate product development within these constraints.
• Ethical Considerations: Examine the moral imperatives of AI, from ensuring unbiased algorithms to the broader societal impacts and considerations.
• Transparency, Accuracy and security: Learn how to cultivate trust in AI products by ensuring clear decision-making processes, high accuracy rates, and robust security measures.
Speakers
Dr. Steve Mayner
VP Framework, Methodologist & SAFe Fellow at Scaled Agile, Inc.
By reducing the routine, repetitive tasks that create toil for the individual contributor, Gen AI tools enable more ‘time in zone’ for higher-order, critical thinking work.
When:
December 13, 2023, 10:00 am – December 13, 2023, 11:00 am MST
Where:
Zoom
Who:
Agile Coach, Consultant, Product Manager, Product Owner, Program or Project Manager, Release Train Engineer, SAFe Members, Scrum Master
In this session, we will unravel the potent capabilities of tools to streamline technology product development and elevate creative and strategic focus.
• Generative AI Overview: Dive into generative AI and its positive impact on SAFe roles, offering a competitive edge in the tech development landscape.
• Practical Application Examples: Witness real-world examples of how top-tier generative AI tools replace mundane tasks, ensuring optimal utilization of human effort for pivotal roles.
• Transition to Higher-Order Tasks: Learn strategies to redirect workforce focus from repetitive tasks to critical thinking assignments, catalyzing innovation and strategic growth.
Speakers
Cheryl Crupi
Methodologist and SAFe Fellow at Scaled Agile, Inc.
Rebecca Davis
Methodologist and SAFe Fellow at Scaled Agile, Inc.
Building, Operating, and Scaling AI-Enabled Solutions with SAFe
SAFe Enterprises often encounter challenges integrating AI technology into their production solutions. Early adopters of AI have found ways to address the common barriers to building, operating, and scaling AI-enabled products.
When:
November 15, 2023, 10:00 am – November 15, 2023, 11:00 am MST
Where:
Zoom
Who:
Agile Coach, Product Manager, Product Owner, Program or Project Manager, Release Train Engineer, Scrum Master
This webinar will examine the impacts of AI solution development on people, processes, and technology, as well as the commitments SAFe organizations should be prepared to make for creating desirable, viable, feasible, and sustainable AI solutions.
• Identify the new roles needed in Agile teams and ARTs, and the upskilling needed across all SAFe roles.
• Understand the new processes that must be added to the product development lifecyle to support AI solutions.
• Explore the new classes of tools that form the architectural runway needed to support AI development.
Speakers
Marc Rix
Methodologist & SAFe Fellow at Scaled Agile, Inc.
Harry Koehnemann
Methodologist & SAFe Fellow at Scaled Agile, Inc.
Dr. Wiselin Mathuram
SPCT, Chief Transformation Officer at International Business Consultants, LLC
Jeff Shupack
SAFe Fellow, President of Advisory Practice at Project & Team, Inc.
The Implementing SAFe® Exemplar course, offered by Scaled Agile, Inc., stands out as a distinctive learning experience. It is taught by the world’s most seasoned SAFe® Fellows and members of the Scaled Agile Framework team. This is your golden chance to learn directly from the architects of the framework, those at the cutting edge of pressing business challenges. Bring your toughest questions and get insights straight from the experts. You won’t want to miss this unparalleled opportunity with the Implementing SAFe® Exemplar.
Be sure to check out additional course offerings provided by our Partner Community on the Training Calendar.
Want to become SPCT certified? Learn more about the SAFe® Practice Consultant-T (SPCT) certification here.
What makes this an Exemplar?
Taught by SAFe Framework team members and SAFe Fellows
Testbed for new IP
SPCT Immersion week
Event Overview
Ready to lead a Lean-Agile transformation?
Need a deeper understanding of the Scaled Agile Framework?
Looking to teach SAFe courses yourself?
Implementing SAFe® offers attendees the broadest level of insight into each layer of a SAFe implementation. This course is for those who want to be a leader in a Lean-Agile transformation. This course and resulting certification will help you understand the roles of each person in SAFe organization and then plan and guide a SAFe transformation.
You’ll learn how to identify value streams, launch agile release trains, optimize flow, and apply OKRs to Strategic Themes that define the targeted outcomes for the SAFe transformation. You’ll also practice the principles of Agile product management and product delivery. If you’re looking for a comprehensive and practical understanding of how to help an organization achieve business agility effectively, Implementing SAFe® is the right course for you.
Instructors
Dean Leffingwell Co-Founder and Chief Methodologist (Scaled Agile, Inc.)
Recognized as one of the world’s foremost authorities on Lean-Agile best practices, Dean Leffingwell is an author, entrepreneur, and software and systems development methodologist. His two best-selling books, Agile Software Requirements: Lean Requirements Practices for Teams, Programs, and the Enterprise and Scaling Software Agility: Best Practices for Large Enterprises, form much of the basis of modern thinking on Lean-Agile practices and principles. Founder of several successful startups, including Requisite, Inc., makers of RequisitePro (acquired by Rational), Mr. Leffingwell also served as Chief Methodologist to Rally Software, and prior to that, as a Sr. Vice President at Rational Software (now part of IBM). He currently serves as Chief Methodologist to Scaled Agile, Inc., which he co-founded in 2011.
Andrew Sales Chief Methodologist and SAFe Fellow (Scaled Agile, Inc.)
Andrew Sales is an experienced Agile Consultant and previously led the Agile Services Practice across EMEA for CA Technologies (formerly Rally). Drawing on his diverse range of skills and experiences from project management, software development, product management and sales, Andrew has worked with many organizations to help them successfully establish better ways of working. He is passionate about continuous improvement and provides coaching to teams and leaders, supporting them in achieving improved outcomes for their business and their customers.
Rebecca Davis SAFe Methodologist and SAFe Fellow (Scaled Agile, Inc.)
Rebecca Davis has been leading Agile teams, trains, and leaders for over 15 years within startups, mid-size, and Fortune 100 enterprises. Davis brings her experience as a former Release Train Engineer, Scrum Master, Portfolio Lead, Quality Director, and LACE Director into her current activities. Rebecca is a SAFe Fellow, Methodologist, and SPCT on the Scaled Agile Framework Team who highlights joy and energy within her work. Most recently, Rebecca led the Agile Transformation as Director of Scaled Agile Practices and Leader of the Digital LACE within the Fortune 4 and Global 7, where over 4 years, she expanded Scaled Agile Practices from 300 to over 10k working within a Scaled Agile model across the organization, including IT, Marketing, Digital experiences, and Retail business
Agilists have been talking about business and technology alignment since the beginning of the Agile movement. Many experience challenges with integrating POs and PMs from the business onto the delivery ARTs, especially if the ARTs are in technology organizations. What’s the career incentive and path? What skills are needed? And how to create high-performing teams including the business members. Join this expert panel of Mark Saymen and Vikas Kapila to discuss why this is important and tips to help overcome these challenges.
Don’t miss out on this opportunity to transform to business-enabled ARTs!
Sign Up Now!
Speakers
Deema Dajani
SAFe® Fellow, Product Director (Scaled Agile, Inc.)
Draws on a Startup background and an MBA from Kellogg Deema helps established enterprises create the environment to shape disruption with business agility and Lean Portfolio Management (LPM). Started her Agile journey in the early 2000’s as a Product Manager, Director of Strategy, and pre-IPO turn around specialist. Deema transitioned to advisory where she led some of the largest transformations to Lean-Agile with SAFe in Financial Services and Insurance. Deema currently serves as a Scaled Agile Product Manager focused on LPM and Leadership. Co-founder of the Women in Agile, a non-profit organization focused on breaking barriers and inclusivity in the agile community.
Vikas Kapila
CEO (Enterprise Agility Consulting)
Vikas is a business transformation practitioner with a passion for applying Lean-Agile principles, behaviors and practices to enable delivery of highest business value with built-in quality at the earliest in a predictably and sustainable cycle. He excels at quickly delivering business value, simplifying the seemingly complex, and delighting customers. He is able to achieve these results by consistently building radically prolific, high performing teams by believing to look listen & learn before initiating collaboration, coaching, training and facilitation.
Mark Saymen
Title (Agile Agilist)
A career story from Developer to Partner has taken me around the world implementing digital transformation, training, and implementing SAFe. Mark thrives with ambiguity and challenges. Mark welcomes tough questions and complex challenges leveraging the power of Digital to help organizations create a culture of innovation and increase team happiness, fulfillment, and engagement. Some of my tools are Resilience Engineering, DevOps, Coaching, Agile at Scale, Training, and Mindset.
Earn your SAFe® RTE Certification and help lead Agile Release Trains
Unique to SAFe®, the Release Train Engineer (RTE) is part of the trio of leaders, including product managers and system architects. This is critical in leading Agile Release Trains (ARTs) to deliver value. The RTE must create the right environment, have the right conversations, facilitate the right meetings, and gather the right people to make decisions based on the right data.
In the SAFe® RTE course, you’ll learn to execute SAFe and continuously improve PI Planning and other vital SAFe events. You’ll discover how to coach leaders, teams, and Scrum Masters in new processes and mindsets. And you’ll get the guidance and tools you need to work effectively in remote environments with distributed teams.
Attendees learn:
How to lead ARTs and large solutions in a SAFe organization
How to apply Lean-Agile knowledge and tools to release value
How to foster relentless improvement
How to build a high-performing ART by becoming a servant leader and coach
Course workbook and SAFe Studio access to help you prepare to take the certification exam, claim your digital badge, and tools to get started in your SAFe role
One-year access to SAFe® Studio with your first class attend
Access to the latest Framework guidance
Access to RTE Essentials Online Learning Series
Facilitation Guides for all ART events
Online collaboration tools for facilitating SAFe ART events, like PI Planning and System Demo
Access to content, tools, and resources you need to practice Scaled Agile Framework every day
SAFe® Release Train Engineer certification exam
What people say about SAFe® Release Train Engineer
“Mastering the role definitely comes with practical experience, however, this was certainly a 100% life skill foundation.”
What people say about SAFe Release Train Engineer
“I really appreciate the RTE role and how SAFe takes the best of Agile and Lean methodology.”
What people say about SAFe Release Train Engineer
“The course exercises were relevant and well paced to provide input and supplement our learning.”
What people say about SAFe Release Train Engineer
“It reminds RTEs of the importance of coaching, how to manage conflicts, and building high performing teams.”
Join our virtual event on Wednesday, March 15, at 12:00 PM MDT/6:00 PM GMT to see the full launch and learn what it means for your organization. Sign up to receive a reminder one hour before the event to ensure you don’t miss it.
Welcome to the third post in our series about SAFe best practices to create a healthy relationship between product owners (POs) and product managers (PMs) that helps to achieve business agility and drives product success. You can check out the previous post here.
In this post, we’ll dive into examples of how you might find yourself in the feature In this post, we’ll dive into examples of how you might find yourself in the feature factory described in our first post. Plus, we’ll offer some thoughts about how to get back to strong PO/PM relationships and focus on delivering value.
Scenario One: Who are you talking to?
Picture this: You’re a PM at a company that’s designing a new app. In the spirit of customer centricity, you’re actively getting feedback. You’re regularly talking to a couple of hyper-engaged customers from Company X. It’s a large company and you’ve got a strong relationship with one of their internal champions who’s easy to get in touch with. During one of these customer feedback sessions, a developer on your team joins the call, too. Afterwards, while you’re confident things are headed in the right direction, your developer wonders out loud why the customer thinks to feature A is great if she really hasn’t used it yet.
Contacting the same customer for feedback on every new thing your company is working on isn’t the best approach. Why? If you’re not careful, you might end up thinking about her as representative of all the rest of your customers with the same job title. That’s likely not the case, so you should also be talking to customers at different companies with different needs for whatever it is you’re building. Another thing to think about: if it’s just you talking to the same customer all the time, you’ll often believe that your organization is always building the right thing. Inviting other people in your organization to collaborate with you on those customer calls might uncover a different perspective, as your developer did in the previous scenario. Having those two or three perspectives in the room is greater as a whole than as individual viewpoints.
Scenario Two: What are you measuring?
Picture this: Your organization developed a page on a website and is seeing 20 percent user adoption on that page. As the PM, you think that’s successful because you’re hitting a key performance indicator (KPI) revealing that 20 percent of people logging in are using the page. But your PO feels that’s not necessarily true because the metric represents the same handful of people logging in, not 20 percent of overall users, which is how they interpreted the KPI of “20-percent adoption.” To address the data conflict, you and the PO look at the feature to see what the details of the KPI were. Turns out there aren’t any details, nor is there any mention of baseline metrics. So, neither of you know if the page was successful or not, or if you should pivot or persevere, or what to compare the data to. And the team’s efforts turned into a feature factory because the goals were really about getting the features out the door instead of the goals themselves.
It seems really apparent that PMs and POs need to agree on what measurements translate to a successful outcome, and how they’ll be tracked and interpreted. But we often skip over that part, just assuming all that will be obvious when the time comes. But actually, that assumption often leads to data conflicts. Aligning on metrics is hard work. You may not even know exactly how to measure success yet and you might have to slow down before you speed up, but agreement is critical to avoid future data conflicts.
Get smart
The same applies to determining the goal of the work and the value to the customer using SMART objectives. Many of us are familiar with these. But really, how often do you and the team take the time to get alignment and a clear, shared understanding of all the details of your objective? Is it specific, measurable, achievable, realistic, and time-bound (SMART)? Or is it just specific but not measurable?
And remember, it’s ok to fail, as long as you’re learning and applying what you learn to improve. The learning part is only possible in a culture that allows for failure, for example, where you’re not hitting the metrics. It’s a culture where people don’t feel the need to mess with the data or avoid committing to a measure from the beginning. It’s part of the innovation process to fail. If the culture doesn’t allow for that, then you’ll get a culture of people that skip that step on purpose to make it look like they’re successful..
The trap of the feature factory is easy to fall into. I hope now that you have a clear path to:
Improve how you collect and perceive customer feedback
Write clearer KPIs with baseline metrics
Clearly define and align on SMART goals across teams
Armed with this information, you can better recognize the trap, and use your PO/PM relationship to stay out of it.
Check back soon for another post in our PO/PM success series.
About Lieschen Gargano Quilling
Lieschen Gargano is an Agile coach and conflict guru—thanks in part to her master’s degree in conflict resolution. As the scrum master for the marketing team at Scaled Agile, Lieschen loves cultivating new ideas and approaches to Agile to keep things fresh and exciting. She also has a passion for developing best practices for happy teams to deliver value in both development and non-technical environments. Fun fact? “I’m the only person I know of who’s been a scrum master and a scrum half on a rugby team.”
Welcome to the second post in our series about SAFe best practices to create a healthy relationship between product owners and product managers that drives product success. You can read the first post here.
I’ve heard lots of metaphors used to describe the relationship between a product owner (PO) and a product manager (PM). One of my favorites is oil and vinegar—separately, they’re just liquid on a salad, but mix them together and you’ve got a great dressing.
A PO and a PM working together creates a positive tension that leads to a great relationship—despite different opinions—that’s in others’ best interests. But combining the PO and PM into one role is a recipe for disaster.
I know because I experienced the trouble firsthand.
Think about the core responsibilities for both roles:
Be the voice of the customer
Analyze data
Manage backlogs
Make customers happy
Organize cross-team syncs
Create roadmaps
Support planning
Seek out competitive intelligence
Aid support escalations
Help sales activities
One person simply can’t do all these activities in a typical work week. When I’ve been in this situation, I found that the urgent, tactical things come first as people clamor for responses, feedback, and direction on their daily work—ultimately causing important strategies to suffer. Some days, I’d already made two to three stressful decisions before morning tea and was expected to make more at strategic levels. I quickly experienced decision fatigue. When your company and solution are small, you might be able to do it all, but it doesn’t scale.
There’s a strong stereotype that PMs need to be mini CEOs and be just as stressed out. That’s not sustainable as a product person. When a PM is also doing the work of a PO, expecting them to do strategy and manage the team backlog throughout the PI isn’t realistic. You miss the strategic work, you miss pivot-or-persevere opportunities. I’d often ask myself, “Am I really looking at the big picture or just surviving?”
The power of an Agile team is that it’s a high-functioning group that collaborates. And when the PO and PM roles are performed by two different people, they can work together to support those teams, and ultimately, the organization. When I was a PO working with a PM to deliver a new onboarding experience for our product, we stayed in sync. I focused on what our technology allowed and what the team could implement. She focused on market impact and educating our sales team. We had healthy, productive conversations with positive conflict about what should happen next, and split the duties of attending meetings. All while continuing our business-as-usual activities and still finding time to recharge for the next day.
If you’re a leader, avoid having one person take on both roles. If you’re doing both of these jobs, don’t. Perhaps there’s someone in your organization who can help you by serving informally in the other role. Finding the balance that I just described is key to your and your product’s success. POs and PMs don’t have to be in the same places but they need to connect, be aligned, and maintain that positive tension. It’s why we teach these roles together in our SAFe POPM class—you need to know how to best collaborate with your peer PO or PM to excel.
If you’re free on August 26 at 6:00 PM MDT, join Lieschen and I at an online Agile Boulder meetup where we’ll talk about this very topic.
Check back soon for the next post in our series about shared objectives and collaborative ‘sense making.’
About William Kammersell
William Kammersell is a Product Manager and SAFe® Program Consultant (SPC) at Scaled Agile. With over a decade in Agile software development, he loves researching customer problems to deliver valuable solutions and sharing his passion for product development with others. William’s journey as a developer, scrum master, Agile coach, product owner, and product manager has led him through a variety of B2B and B2C industries such as foreign language learning, email marketing, and government contracting.
Both product owners (POs) and product managers (PMs) have “product” in their titles. Both roles connect people to the customer to ensure we’re building the right thing. Both roles rely on data to inform decisions and spot trends by correlating that data to everything that’s going on across the organization. Both roles manage backlogs. And both roles make customers happy. So, what’s the difference between a PO and a PM?
Product managers concentrate on the program backlog and features, look one to three program increments ahead, and focus on product viability. They collaborate with business owners and those at the solution and strategic levels within SAFe®.
Product owners concentrate on the team backlog and stories, look one to three months ahead, collaborate with the team, and focus on product feasibility.
Seems straightforward enough, but we’ve heard feedback from people in the field that the PO-PM structure within SAFe isn’t so great.
“I’ve trained dozens of teams who are using SAFe and I have never seen this work well. The Product Owners are disconnected from their users and incapable of creating effective solutions for them that really solve their problems, because they do not understand the problems well. The Product Managers are essentially ‘waterfalling’ down the requirements to them and the teams are not allowed to prove if these are the right things to build or not. No one is doing validation work.”
—Melissa Perri, Product Manager vs. Product Owner
The feature factory
What’s described above is something many call “the feature factory.” Organizations quickly fall into the feature-factory trap when POs stop talking to external customers, going with the word of the PM instead and losing sight of the user’s needs. It also happens when PMs become disconnected from the teams, choosing to write requirements that are handed off to POs instead of aligning with teams and POs on objectives about how to best achieve them. By not connecting with the team, over time, PMs start making all the decisions on their own and there’s no room for teams to provide ideas to their own backlogs—essentially ‘waterfalling’ their PIs as described above and creating a culture of meeting acceptance criteria instead of focusing on objectives.
We often also see feature factories when PMs and POs never say “no” to requests from customers or business owners. Catering to the desires of a few large clients or to executives’ individual objectives can cause PMs and POs to drop validation work and strategy in response to those requests. Without validation work, there aren’t any clear pivot-or-persevere moments for checking in to see if we’re understanding the problem correctly or even solving their problems. Instead, we’re practicing waterfall and calling it SAFe.
In this blog series, William Kammersell, our curriculum product manager, and I will share practices to help you avoid the feature factory and create a healthy PO-PM relationship that drives product success.
Lieschen Gargano is an Agile coach and conflict guru—thanks in part to her master’s degree in conflict resolution. As the scrum master for the marketing team at Scaled Agile, Lieschen loves cultivating new ideas and approaches to Agile to keep things fresh and exciting. She also has a passion for developing best practices for happy teams to deliver value in both development and non-technical environments. Fun fact? “I’m the only person I know of who’s been a scrum master and a scrum half on a rugby team.”
