How ProdPad Fits with Scaled Agile Framework (SAFe)
What is SAFe?
Scaled Agile Framework (SAFe) is a development methodology which has been designed to provide enterprise agility in a large development organization.
SAFe addresses problems where agile teams work within a broader waterfall organization. While one or more teams may be agile, the broader organization’s waterfall approach overpowers the benefits of agility within the team.
Frameworks like SAFe provide a way to coordinate agile behaviors with the goal of increasing agility across the whole organization.
You’re in SAFe hands with ProdPad
ProdPad provides the tools required for Lean Portfolio Management, Organizational Agility and the Continuous Learning Culture, as recommended by SAFe. It helps coordinate discovery, product roadmaps and customer feedback across the entire organization, at team, product line and portfolio levels. Overall, it helps product teams prepare for the delivery phase, as using the agile release train. Using ProdPad during the discovery phase ensures that planned work is more likely to result in the right outcomes for the user, along with success for the organization.
By separating strategy and execution, product managers can ensure they are able to provide product roadmaps and specifications needed by the development organization whilst maintaining the ability to discover market problems and define the right solutions for their users.
Lean Roadmap
By grouping together ideas under problems to solve, the product manager is able to prioritize work for the delivery team and ensure the upcoming sprints are focused on solving market problems. The lean roadmap also encourages iteration and continuous improvement, reducing the risk of becoming a “Feature Factory”. Agile teams have greater visibility into the big picture and understand how their work fits into the wider strategy.
Idea Backlog
The product manager gathers all the potential ideas for product improvement into the Idea backlog, which can be used through the discovery process to identify the right solutions. By using filters and impact/effort scoring, product managers can identify which ideas are the most important and link them to the relevant problems on the roadmap. This in turn helps with the prioritization process.
Workflows and Integrations
ProdPad’s workflow allows ideas to progress through the process of discovery -> specification -> development -> measuring success. This helps the product owner understand which ideas are ready to be put into the SAFe process. Within each workflow stage, the product owner can also prioritize the ideas (top to bottom) ensuring that everyone understands what is most important when sprint planning takes place.
Once the idea is pushed to development’s tool of choice using the relevant integration, ProdPad’s workflow stage is kept up to date based on a mapping to development, meaning that business stakeholders can see a simplified version of the development process and understand how progress is being made by reviewing the roadmap or checking out the idea itself.
Customer Feedback
The primary goal of all product teams is to solve problems for their customers! ProdPad’s customer feedback module allows the customer’s voice to be heard and helps the product team understand which problems are the most important to solve. Having context about customer problems means the product team is more likely to provide acceptable solutions for the customer.
This is part of our “How ProdPad Fits” pages. See our other “How ProdPad Fits” pages.