Survey shows UX in SAFe is lived very differently
First results from Switzerland show that UX in SAFe is lived differently across organizations. Contribute with your voice — survey still ongoing!
Scaling agile is increasingly popular in large firms. In Switzerland, the scaled agile framework (SAFe) is widespread. Still, there’s an ongoing debate on how user experience work can best be integrated into the SAFe way of working.
We wanted to shed some light on what works, what doesn’t, and how to improve it. We’ve thus conducted research with many large companies in Switzerland using SAFe and we’re now expanding the survey to other European countries. Share your voice now, or see the first result from the 32 Swiss responses.
Within the survey group, SAFe only has a single promoter
We asked participants whether they would recommend SAFe. What becomes instantly visible is that there’s a wide variety of experiences and opinions on how UX works in SAFe.
With our 30 respondents, SAFe has a net promoter score of -57 — a result based on a single promoter and 18 detractors. Still, 11 of the participants are “NPS passives”, which is a good indication that many experiences with UX revolve around mediocre collaboration. Some things work, some things don’t, but overall these people feel that improvements are needed. There seems to be a clear gap between the promise of increasing customer-centricity by adopting SAFe and delivering this in practice.
UX work isn’t fully recognized in 60% of organizations
What’s a possible root of these poor ratings? From our analysis, it seems that UX work lacking recognition in around 60% of the companies might be the cause.
This is surprising because every SAFe organization in theory is constructed to literally “deliver a solution to customers”. SAFe also mentions concepts like Lean UX, design thinking, or customer-centricity.
We’re thus guessing that organizations that had understood the value of user experience before switching to SAFe still do appreciate its contributions — and those others probably still don’t. SAFe might have failed some organizations to educate on the value of design (as might their UXers).
Another reason might be that Lean UX — one way of doing UX — has only been added to the framework with version 4.5, a massive six years after the first version. UX isn’t as prominent as other practices of the framework.
All these may be the reason many practitioners describe user experience work in SAFe as being tricky.
What then are UXers doing?
Surprisingly enough, UXers are contributing to many of the artifacts central to working in SAFe. Some 90% of respondents say UX staff work on features, some 80% on stories, and some 60% even contribute to epics, which in SAFe are described as containing significant initiatives with substantial investments. One must wonder: how can this work not be officially recognized at least as a cog in the machine?
When asked what kind of work UX people do, replies show a wide range of involvement with the design of solutions. More than 80% of UXers create prototypes and lead usability tests, and around 70% of staff follow through with pixel-perfect design. While around 60% also lead user research, this falls to 35% for data or analytics research.
Based on these results, UX activities seem very much delivery-focused versus discovery-focused — an unbalanced situation for user experience design.
The vast majority of people surveyed design digital experiences (94%), but half of the UXers are also responsible for omnichannel design. One could deduct that — for our participants — UX work means designing digital-first.
When it comes to efforts usually connected to product management, numbers decrease: managing minimal viable products (31%), orchestrating experiences (22%), or managing epic discovery (16%) seem to be the outliers. Only 2 respondents said that they manage products.
Extend this research with your voice
At first glance, it seems like UX staff in Switzerland are doing the right things in their SAFe context, but fail to receive or gain recognition for it. This is in sharp contrast to a framework, which puts customer-centricity at its core.
Why then does it seem UX work isn’t wholly valued or encouraged in the organizations of our survey takers? To better understand this, we’ll look at what respondents have replied to the survey’s open questions in the next step.
Before that, please share your voice by taking part in the survey. Having sound and diverse insights will allow us to address issues with the SAFe contributors to improve life for UXers, and thus customers.
This article was co-written by Felix Kaiser (Frontiers), Daniel Boos (SBB), and Peter Horvath (Whitespace) who are part of the Business & Design Collective, a Swiss initiative connecting business and design.
