Jory MacKay

Jory is a writer, content strategist and award-winning editor of the Unsplash Book. He contributes to Inc., Fast Company, Quartz, and more.

October 01, 2025 · 10 min read

How to stay lean at scale with the Scaled Agile Framework (SAFe)

How to stay lean at scale with the Scaled Agile Framework (SAFe))

For Agile teams and companies, scaling can often feel at odds with Agile’s core ethos of focusing on individuals, collaborating with customers, and responding to changes.

Scaling is so daunting that the number of companies actively expanding their workforce is down by 40% in recent years.

But it’s not impossible to scale and stay Agile.

The Scaled Agile Framework (often shortened to SAFe) is a process that helps teams maintain clear lines of communication and nimble decision-making processes, all while delivering bigger, more complex, and cross-functional projects.

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Like any process change, scaling up and adopting SAFe comes with its own risks, downsides, and pitfalls, and might not be right for everyone. In this guide, we’ll explain how SAFe works, when to think about implementing it, and how you can bring a scaled Agile framework to your own team.

What is Scaled Agile Framework (SAFe)? Is it right for you?

The Scaled Agile Framework (SAFe) is a set of organizational processes, workflows, and job roles designed to support teams as they scale their lean-Agile practices.

SAFe isn’t brand-new; it’s actually an evolution of traditional Agile, incorporating principles from Lean, Agile, Scrum, DevOps, and systems thinking to create a framework that maintains the agility and speed of a small startup while benefiting from the benefits of scale.

For most companies, the best way to think about SAFe is as a solution to a specific and well-known problem:

Problem: A single team can work in sprints and have regular retrospectives, but what happens when you have dozens of those teams, all with different roadmaps and priorities?
Solution: SAFe provides the structure to align all those teams and get them working towards a single goal.

How does SAFe work in practice?

If you’re familiar with traditional product team structure, specifically Scrum, you’ll know that Agile is all about small, cross-functional teams, with clearly defined roles, working in a series of sprints to create incremental value.

SAFe is an evolution of this approach. SAFe helps companies scale up product teams to an enterprise level, taking individual sprints and combining them into Program Increments (PIs), to plan, build, and test strategic value on a monthly or quarterly basis.

To do this, SAFe organizes team members into Agile Release Trains, often called ARTs for short.

What is an Agile Release Train?)

An ART is a long-lived, cross-functional group of 5-12 smaller Agile teams (often reaching around 50–125 people in total) that work together to develop and deliver solutions under the common objective of the PI.

Let’s look at an example:

An airline wants to begin offering hotels alongside flights. The website team sets a quarterly PI objective to launch an initial offering of five new hotels on their website.
Within the wider website agile release train (ART), they have five Agile teams that each manage part of the website journey: search, browse, booking, payment, and after-sales support.
Each of those Agile teams defines the requirements and user stories, then builds and tests their solution components to support the PI objective, working together to coordinate and collaborate on their components of the work.

In most organizations, those Agile teams use Scrum, or another Agile framework, at the team-level, with strategic-level Product Managers, Architects, and Release Train Engineers (RTE) overseeing the coordination and alignment across the teams.

It’s best to think of an RTE as a super-scrum master, who takes a servant leader approach to facilitate the events that happen within the release train.

Much like lower-level scrum-teams, the RTE will facilitate PI planning, daily standups using a program board, and retrospectives to learn lessons for the future.

The foundational SAFe values and principles

Every great delivery framework needs a set of guiding principles to ensure its success, and SAFe is no exception. In fact, SAFe comes equipped with many values and principles, helping teams set long-term objectives alongside day-to-day working practices.

The four core values of SAFe are:

Alignment across teams. SAFe provides a clear, shared vision so that everyone is working towards the same objectives. This ensures that every team understands their role in delivering value to the customer.
Built-in quality. Small teams often have greater quality as they’re closer to their work. SAFe prioritizes quality as teams scale, ensuring quality is considered at every step of the process, not just as a tickbox at the end.
Transparency. All information is shared openly, from backlogs to progress, allowing for quick decision-making and accountability. This serves to make the hard stuff easier, and help teams ride the waves of uncertainty and complexity.
Program execution. There’s no point having fancy processes and workflows if teams can’t deliver. SAFe also focuses on outcomes to ensure value is delivered consistently and efficiently to the entire organisation, similar to a traditional program management approach.

While those four core values give a high-level overview of how SAFe companies should operate, the creators of SAFe also provide tactical principles to help guide your day-to-day work.

Here are SAFe’s ten core principles:

Take an economic view. When making decisions, you must always consider the economic impact. SAFe encourages you to weigh the costs, delays, and risks against the value you’re delivering.
Apply systems thinking. The entire enterprise, from development to operations, is a single system. We must understand how the different components interact and affect each other, rather than just optimizing our own little corner of the business.
Assume variability; preserve options. In a complex world, things rarely go to plan. \ SAFe encourages us to assume that requirements and design will change. By preserving options, we can adapt to new information and make better decisions.
Build incrementally with fast, integrated learning cycles. Instead of building a massive solution at once, we should deliver it in small, manageable pieces. This allows us to get feedback from customers early and often, ensuring we’re building the right thing.
Base milestones on objective evaluation of working systems. We shouldn’t be celebrating milestones based on whether we’ve hit a deadline. Instead, we should be evaluating our progress based on the objective value we’ve delivered to customers in a working system.
Make value flow without interruptions. The goal of SAFe is to deliver value to the customer as quickly as possible. To do that, we need to eliminate bottlenecks and other interruptions that slow down the process.
Apply cadence, synchronize with cross-domain planning. Cadence, or a regular rhythm, helps us plan and deliver work predictably. By synchronizing our work across teams, we can ensure that everyone is working towards the same goals.
Unlock the intrinsic motivation of knowledge workers. People want to do a good job, and they want to be part of something meaningful. SAFe is built on the idea that we can empower teams to do great work by giving them the autonomy and support they need to succeed.
Decentralize decision-making. We can’t wait for one person to make every decision. By decentralizing decision-making, we empower the people closest to the work to make quick, informed decisions, leading to a faster and more agile business.
Organize around value. The entire organization should be structured around delivering value to the customer. We should break down silos and create cross-functional teams that can deliver value from start to finish.

SAFe offers a powerful roadmap for staying lean and Agile at scale, but it’s only successful if leadership is willing to let go of old ways of working and act as a champion for the change.

A simplified SAFe implementation roadmap

Now that we know a bit more about what SAFe is and how it works, it’s time to start exploring how to implement it.

SAFe has some great guidance for helping you implement their framework, but it can be complex, and each of the 13 steps isn’t always appropriate for every organization.

To help you get an easy understanding of a typical SAFe implementation, let’s run through a simplified step-by-step approach:

1. Determine whether you’ve reached the tipping point for SAFe

Before you do anything else, you need to understand whether SAFe is right for you. Given implementing SAFe is a big undertaking, you need to be sure that the benefits of a scaled framework outweigh the costs of implementation.

Best practices: Start by acknowledging and documenting your current pain points. Ask yourself if your teams are struggling to stay aligned, are lacking direction, and are failing to collaborate effectively. If the answer to these questions is yes, you might have reached the tipping point.
Outputs: By the end of this step, you’ll clearly understand the need for a change and have some level of buy-in from your team to do something about it.

2. Train Lean-Agile agents as ‘champions’

Talking of buy-in, next you need champions to help you on your journey. These are people who are passionate about Lean and Agile and can act as leaders and coaches to help the rest of the team adapt.

Best practices: Start by training a small group of people who are already passionate about change. These people will be your most important allies on this journey. There are formal and informal SAFe training courses run across the globe, so there are many options depending on your budget.
Outputs: After this step, you’ll have a small team of agents who are well-versed in SAFe and ready to help you implement it.

Train Lean-Agile agents as ‘champions’)

3. Create a Lean-Agile Center of Excellence (LACE)

The LACE is a small, dedicated team that’s responsible for the overall success of the SAFe implementation. They’ll be your central hub for all things SAFe, helping to provide guidance and support to the rest of the business.

Best practices: The LACE should be made up of a cross-functional team of people who are passionate about Agile and have the authority to make decisions. It will largely be made up of your change champions, but begin to grow with a variety of different job roles.
Outputs: Now, you’ll have a wider network of SAFe experts and advocates, ready to support the SAFe rollout.

4. Get your executive, management, and leaders on board

SAFe is a big commitment, and it needs to come from the top. You’ll need to get your executive, management, and leaders on board with the change, as they are the ones who will ultimately be responsible for its success.

Best practices: You need to clearly communicate the benefits of SAFe and how it can help the business achieve its goals. For example, in the latest State of Agile report, 60% of leaders said collaboration improved in their company by using frameworks like SAFe.
Outputs: By the end of this step, you’ll have a clear commitment from leadership to the SAFe implementation.

It’s not impossible to scale and stay Agile.

5. Organize your work around value

With stakeholders bought in, next you need to reorganize your business around value streams (i.e., complete series of actions and steps an organization takes to design, create, and deliver a product or service to a customer). This helps break down silos and create cross-functional teams that can deliver value from start to finish.

Best practices: You need to identify your business’s value streams and map out how work flows through them — here’s a great article to help you get started. Once your value streams are defined, you can reorganize your teams around them.
Outputs: You’ll have a clear understanding of your business’s value streams and a plan to reorganize your teams around them.

6. Create a SAFe implementation plan

Putting your ART, processes, and ceremonies in place takes coordination, so you need a clear implementation plan. This includes everything from the timeline of changes to the resources you’ll need to make it happen.

Best practices: Create a roadmap for implementation that includes training, communications, and hard deliverables to bring SAFe to life. Most organizations use a SAFe accredited implementation partner to support them along the journey.
Outputs: You’ll have a clear, actionable plan for the SAFe implementation, including roles, responsibilities, milestones, and resources.

7. Prepare, train, and launch your first agile release train (ART)

This is a key milestone on your SAFe journey, as you’ll begin working in your first Agile release train, proving you can deliver Agile products at scale across your organization.

Best practices: Start with a pilot ART so you can work out any kinks before you roll it out to the rest of the business. You also need to ensure that the teams are well-trained and have the right tools to succeed.
Outputs: You’ll have a working ART that is ready to deliver value.

Pro tip: This is where tools like Planio are essential for SAFe success. As change gets bigger and more complex, Planio’s Agile task management, communication, and reporting features help you and the team stay organized while boosting collaboration.

Screenshot of Planio Gantt chart function with Sprint 42 shown and the assigned issues clearly ordered unerneath.)

Create sprint plans and aggregate them into a program increment (PI) report, using Gantt charts to show your entire roadmap in one place.

8. Monitor, learn, and scale

SAFe isn’t a one-and-done implementation. You need to constantly monitor your progress and learn from your mistakes as you scale up across your entire portfolio. This can take months or even years. Be patient and follow the process in a controlled and structured way.

Best practices: Measuring your success using key metrics, such as time-to-market, velocity, and customer satisfaction. You should also be holding regular retrospectives to discuss what went well and what didn’t, before taking steps to roll out more ARTs into other areas of your business.
Outputs: You’ll have a clear understanding of your progress, what’s working and what isn’t, and a plan to improve and scale across your organization.

SAFe vs. other Agile-at-scale frameworks

While SAFe is the most common scaled Agile framework, it isn’t the only one out there. Choosing the right one is essential for success, and it’s important to understand the differences before you commit.

Here’s a comparison of SAFe and some other popular scaled Agile methodologies:

Framework	How it works	Best for	Issues to overcome
SAFe	A hierarchical structure that’s highly prescriptive, with detailed guidance for every role and process.	Large organizations (500+) that need strong structure to support Agile delivery.	Can be seen as quite complex and heavy and often requires significant investment to implement.
Scrum@Scale (S@S)	A scaled Scrum framework, using a ‘scrum of scrum’ strategy to align teams on strategy and execution.	Organizations already using Scrum who want a simple way to improve alignment.	Less structured than SAFe, and often relies on the individual capability of leaders and managers to succeed.
Large-Scale Scrum (LeSS)	As the name suggests, LeSS focuses on ‘less is more’ with a minimalist approach to scaling Scrum.	Medium sized organizations, of around 2-8 agile teams, with a strong Agile culture.	The minimalist approach provides little guidance on things like portfolio management or governance.
Spotify Model	While not strictly a framework, the Spotify model uses ‘squads’ of cross-functional experts to create autonomy and efficiency at scale.	Product-focused companies that want to build autonomy within independent teams.	It’s a model, not a framework, so it doesn’t provide much implementation guidance. It can be hard to replicate, as it relies on a very specific culture and leadership style.

The 5 common pitfalls of scaling with SAFe

While a SAFe transformation can look great on paper, it’s also a significant change that can be hard going.

To finish up, here are some of the common pitfalls you should work to avoid:

Treating SAFe as a checklist. SAFe provides a lot of guidance, but it’s not a checklist. You need to be willing to adapt and tailor it to your business’s specific needs, following the values and principles as guiding lights.
Starting with too many ARTs at once. You shouldn’t try to roll out SAFe to the entire business at once. Start with a pilot ART so you can work out any kinks before you scale it to the rest of the business.
Ignoring flow metrics. SAFe isn’t just about being busy; it’s about delivering value. You need to be measuring your success using key metrics, such as time-to-market and customer satisfaction, and using that data to improve your process.
Leadership treating SAFe as “fake Agile”. Leadership needs to fully buy into the SAFe framework. If they don’t, they’ll see it as a bureaucratic hurdle to their goals and a waste of time. Take the time up front to get them on board, so they act as champions for change.
Not keeping a central source of knowledge. In a big organization, it’s easy for information to get lost. You need to have a central source of knowledge that everyone can access to ensure they’re all on the same page. This is another area where Planio’s Wiki can help, bringing all your information together in one place for the benefit of the team!

Screenshot of Planio showing the wiki informatinpo set up internally for users to access.))

The bottom line: Staying lean at scale requires strong leadership