So you’re trying to scale agile beyond a single team, huh? Been there. After years of writing code and then somehow ending up as a Scrum Master (funny how that happens), I’ve seen organizations wrestle with this question: do we go with Large-Scale Scrum (LeSS) or the Scaled Agile Framework (SAFe)?
Spoiler alert: it’s complicated, and your mileage will definitely vary.
The Tale of Two Philosophies
LeSS is basically Scrum’s minimalist cousin. It’s rooted in the belief that most complexity is just organizational baggage. So they stripped it down to the essentials. One product, one backlog, one definition of done. Simple, right? Well, simple in concept.
SAFe, on the other hand, is like that comprehensive framework your enterprise architect dreams about. Where’s a detailed playbook for literally everything. And I mean everything – roles, ceremonies, artifacts, the works.
As someone who’s lived through both, I can tell you they feel completely different in practice.
What This Actually Looks Like Day-to-Day
Living with LeSS With LeSS, you’ve got 2-8 teams (or way more if you’re doing LeSS Huge) all working from the same product backlog. Sounds chaotic? It can be. But here’s the beautiful part – you eliminate so much coordination overhead. No more playing telephone between teams or arguing about interfaces that don’t quite match up.
The Sprint Planning is interesting – you do it in two parts, and teams actually coordinate on what they’re building. Revolutionary concept, I know. Daily standups stay at the team level (thank goodness), but you have cross-team coordination when needed. One Sprint Review for everyone, one big retrospective to actually fix systemic problems.
Living with SAFe SAFe gives you Agile Release Trains, which are basically groups of 50-125 people working together. You’ve got Program Increment (PI) Planning sessions that feel like planning mega-events, complete with dependencies mapped out on walls and lots of sticky notes.
There are more roles than you can shake a stick at – Release Train Engineers, Product Managers, System Architects. Sometimes I joke that SAFe created a job for everyone who was worried about being left out of the agile transformation.
The Reality of Implementation
Getting LeSS Off the Ground Here’s where LeSS gets tough. Remember how I mentioned organizational baggage? Well, LeSS forces you to actually throw it out. That means your traditional project managers might not have a home anymore. Your component teams need to become feature teams. Your middle managers need to become coaches or find something else to do.
I’ve seen this work beautifully, but I’ve also seen it crash and burn when organizations weren’t ready for that level of change. It requires what I call “true believer” leadership – people who really get agile principles and are willing to live by them.
Getting SAFe Rolling SAFe is much friendlier to existing org structures. You can usually keep your teams mostly intact and just add the SAFe layer on top. There’s a certification for everything, detailed guides for every role, and templates for every artifact.
The downside? Sometimes it feels like we’ve just recreated waterfall with more ceremonies. I’ve been in PI Planning sessions that felt suspiciously like the old quarterly planning meetings, just with more post-it notes and agile terminology.
When Each One Actually Works
LeSS Sweet Spots LeSS works great when you’ve got a product-focused organization with strong technical teams. Think companies where the engineers actually understand the business and the business folks trust the engineers. It’s perfect for when you’re building something that needs architectural consistency and where coordination overhead is killing your velocity.
I’ve seen it work well in smaller product companies, SaaS businesses, and teams working on platforms where everything needs to fit together nicely.
SAFe Sweet Spots SAFe shines in big enterprises where you can’t just blow up the org chart. Regulated industries love it because it gives them the process documentation they need. If you’ve got distributed teams, complex stakeholder relationships, or need to keep reporting to people who think in terms of projects rather than products, SAFe can work.
It’s also good for organizations going through digital transformation who need training wheels while they figure out this whole agile thing.
The Real Talk on Results
What I’ve Seen with LeSS When LeSS works, it really works. Teams move faster, there’s less bureaucratic nonsense, and developers are generally happier because they’re not dealing with as much process overhead. The code tends to be more cohesive because teams are actually talking to each other.
But when it doesn’t work… ouch. I’ve seen organizations try LeSS, fail because they couldn’t handle the organizational change, and then swing hard in the opposite direction.
What I’ve Seen with SAFe SAFe implementations usually show improvement in metrics – better predictability, happier stakeholders, more visibility into what’s happening. The comprehensive approach means fewer things fall through the cracks.
The downside is that sometimes teams get so focused on following the SAFe playbook that they forget to actually be agile. I’ve been in standups where people were literally reading from a script.
Here’s Where It Gets Interesting: The Human Factor
After watching both frameworks in action, I’ve come to believe that the framework is just the starting point. What really matters is how your people adapt and evolve it. And honestly? Both LeSS and SAFe can be great launching pads for that evolution – just in different ways.
LeSS gives you permission to throw out the rulebook and figure things out as you go. It trusts teams to be smart enough to coordinate without layers of process. When you’ve got mature, communicative teams, this creates space for some really elegant solutions that nobody could have prescribed upfront.
SAFe gives you structure to experiment within. Yeah, it’s got a lot of moving parts, but those parts can be adjusted, combined, or even eliminated as teams get more comfortable. I’ve seen organizations start with full SAFe and gradually simplify, keeping the parts that work for their specific context.
The Evolution Nobody Talks About
What’s really cool is watching how teams take these frameworks and make them their own. I’ve seen LeSS teams develop their own coordination rituals that the framework never prescribed. I’ve seen SAFe teams streamline their PI planning into something way more effective than the standard approach.
The best implementations I’ve witnessed treated the framework like a good baseline – something to start with, not something to be enslaved by. Teams that succeeded asked themselves “What problem are we trying to solve?” rather than “Are we following the framework correctly?”
So Which One Should You Pick?
Here’s my take: choose the framework that gives your specific group of humans the best foundation to build from.
Go with LeSS if:
- Your teams are comfortable with ambiguity and can self-organize
- You’ve got people who like to challenge assumptions and experiment
- Your organization is okay with some messiness while you figure out what works
- Your leadership trusts teams to make smart decisions
Go with SAFe if:
- Your teams want clear structure while they learn to work together
- You’ve got people who perform better with defined processes they can improve incrementally
- Your organization needs predictability while you’re transforming
- Your leadership wants visible frameworks they can understand and modify
The Real Bottom Line
Both frameworks acknowledge something that pure Scrum sometimes misses: scaling agile isn’t just about adding more people to ceremonies. It’s about creating systems that let humans coordinate effectively while preserving the agility that makes teams awesome.
LeSS bets that smart people will figure out coordination naturally if you remove artificial barriers. SAFe bets that smart people need good structure to build coordination skills gradually. Both can be right, depending on your context.
The teams I’ve seen succeed long-term with either framework shared one thing: they treated the framework as a starting point for their own evolution. They used the baseline structure to experiment, learn, and adapt until they had something that fit their unique people, product, and organizational reality.
Don’t get religious about either framework. Pick the one that matches how your people work best, then give them permission to make it better. The agile manifesto says “individuals and interactions over processes and tools” – that applies to scaling frameworks too.
Your job isn’t to implement LeSS or SAFe perfectly. Your job is to help your teams deliver great products while enjoying the work. Use whatever framework gets you closest to that goal, then let your people take it from there.