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The most likely planning anti-pattern in this scenario is when prioritization by Product Management is performed autonomously rather than collaboratively. This is evident from the issue raised during the scrum of scrums, where a Product Manager presents a priority wish list that does not align with the already established Feature prioritization.

In SAFe, it is crucial that prioritization is a collaborative effort involving Product Management, Business Owners, and other stakeholders to ensure alignment and shared understanding of the priorities. The SAFe principle of alignment emphasizes this collaborative approach1. When Product Management operates in isolation, it can lead to misalignment with the rest of the Agile Release Train (ART), causing disruptions and inefficiencies during Program Increment (PI) Planning2.

To prevent such anti-patterns, SAFe recommends that:

Product Management works closely with Business Owners and other stakeholders during the Continuous Exploration process to align on vision, roadmap, and backlogs.

During PI Planning, the RTE (Release Train Engineer) facilitates events where Product Management presents the vision and top features to all teams, ensuring transparency and alignment2.

The scrum of scrums, facilitated by the RTE, is a platform for raising and addressing such issues, promoting collaboration and problem-solving among teams2.

By following these practices, SAFe ensures that prioritization is a collective effort, reflecting the needs and inputs of all relevant parties, and supporting the successful execution of PI Planning.

The System Demo in SAFe serves two main purposes:

To demonstrate the full solution in a production-like context: The System Demo is an event that provides stakeholders with an integrated view of new features delivered by all the teams on the Agile Release Train (ART) for the most recent iteration. It tests and evaluates the complete solution in a production-like environment, often a staging area, which is critical for assessing the solution’s current state1.

To get feedback from the primary stakeholders: The System Demo is a platform for receiving immediate feedback from Business Owners, executive sponsors, other Agile Teams, development management, and customers. This feedback is essential as it guides the ART to stay on course or make necessary adjustments. It is the one objective measure of value, velocity, and progress of the fully integrated work across all the teams1.

The System Demo occurs at the end of every Iteration and provides a fact-based measure of current, system-level progress within the Program Increment (PI). It is a significant event that supports Continuous Integration across the ART and is part of the Inspect and Adapt (I&A) event at the end of each PI, feeding into the retrospective and various PI progress metrics1.

 The Agile Product Delivery is a core competency of the SAFe framework that emphasizes a customer-centric approach to defining, building, and releasing a continuous flow of valuable products and services. It is focused on delivering value through validated learning in short, fast increments1. This competency aligns teams to a common goal via the Agile Product Delivery model, which combines Design Thinking to ensure the solution is desirable, Feasible, Viable, and Sustainable. It also includes DevOps and the Continuous Delivery Pipeline, which helps to automate the delivery process and make it more efficient2.

The key aspects of Agile Product Delivery include:

Developing on Cadence and Releasing on Demand

Building quality in

Product Management

DevOps and Release on Demand

Business Solutions and Lean Systems Engineering

These elements ensure that the solutions are built incrementally and iteratively, allowing for fast feedback and adaptation based on customer needs and market changes. This competency ensures that the enterprise’s work is aligned with customer needs and strategic goals, thereby enhancing business agility12.

Comprehensive and Detailed 250 to 250 words of Explanation From Exact Extract of SAFe 6.0, including the SAFe Release domains:

In SAFe 6.0, identifying and removing bottlenecks is essential to improving flow and accelerating value delivery across the Agile Release Train. One of the primary tools used to identify bottlenecks is Value Stream Mapping. This Lean technique visualizes the end-to-end flow of work, information, and value from concept to delivery, making delays, handoffs, queues, and constraints visible. SAFe emphasizes value stream mapping as a critical practice for optimizing the Continuous Delivery Pipeline and improving system-wide flow.

By mapping each step in the value stream, ARTs can clearly see where work accumulates, where cycle times increase, and where rework or waiting occurs. This insight enables teams and leaders to focus improvement efforts on the most impactful constraints rather than optimizing isolated components. Value stream mapping directly supports SAFe’s Flow Accelerators, particularly “Identify and optimize the bottleneck” and “Eliminate handoffs and non-value-added work.”

While Kanban boards help visualize and manage flow within a defined process, value stream mapping goes further by examining the entire system across organizational boundaries. OKRs are strategic alignment tools and do not identify operational bottlenecks. Ishikawa diagrams are useful for root cause analysis but are not the primary tool for visualizing flow constraints across a value stream.

Therefore, Value Stream Mapping is the SAFe-recommended tool for identifying bottlenecks and enabling continuous flow improvement within the Release domain.