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.”
