Organizational Agility in a Product Company using Essential SAFe
Anuj Ojha
Table of Contents
Executive Summary
PropTech requires velocity, transparency, and inter-team alignment. Companies developing property management software, cloud services, and user portals can’t afford ambiguous roles, variable procedures, or ping-pong rework. Since property software involves both technology and business components, poor communication or misaligned expectations tend to be costly. The absence of speed and alignment typically manifests as three systemic risks: delayed releases that impact market credibility, increased rework due to unclear expectations, and growing friction between business and delivery teams.
Our customer is a UK-headquartered PropTech firm building property management software for the UK market. Their India-based 60-strong dev team, UK-based business/product teams, were working under a partially rolled-out Scrum framework but transparency was poor, process discipline was weak, and projects tended to go off track. They hired NextAgile to introduce predictability, visibility, “one-team” culture, and better delivery results throughout the firm. The engagement was positioned not as a process rollout, but as an operating-model reset by aligning roles, cadences, leadership behavior, and metrics into a single, shared delivery system.
We added role clarity, disciplined sprinting, Essential SAFe, improved requirement elicitation, dashboards, a Center of Excellence (CoE), and leadership coaching. The outcome? Two-week cadence across all teams, higher quality requirements, less rework, richer collaboration, greater technical excellence, and lasting cultural change.
This white paper presents the problem, transformation journey, solutions, outcomes, and lessons that enterprises can apply for their own Agile/SAFe transformations.
Problem Definition
Business Context & Pain Points
Our PropTech client had several interdependent issues:
Blended geographic configuration: 60 development members in India; product / business teams based in the UK. Remote working model.
Incomplete Scrum adoption, but poor discipline in practices like sprint planning, backlog grooming, role responsibilities.
Inadequate planning, capacity and load management problems. Teams consistently overcommit or under-estimate.
Inadequate requirement understanding by dev teams, resulting in constant rework.
Poor predictability in what would be delivered and when.
Inadequate communication, blame culture, no shared responsibility. ‘One team’ culture is absent.
Collectively, these challenges reinforced a cycle of low trust: developers felt reactive, business teams felt unheard, and leadership lacked confidence in forecasts by making predictability a structural issue rather than a team-level problem. These issues equated to delayed delivery dates, stakeholder frustration, inefficiencies, and internal trust erosion (dev vs product/business vs leadership). The client required not only process solutions, but cultural change so that all teams felt aligned, visible, and accountable.
Strategic Objectives
Together with NextAgile’s support, the PropTech client established these transformation objectives:
Roles & responsibilities clarity: Explicitly define what every Scrum Master, Product Owner, Tech Leads, and developers are responsible for.
Visibility & predictability: Be able to predict what needs to be done and when; give stakeholders (business, product, leadership) clear visibility.
Enhance requirements elicitation & planning: Minimize rework through better requirements gathering, understanding, and transforming them into work items.
Implement Essential SAFe: To scale planning, align leadership, connect release levels to business results.
These objectives were intentionally designed to balance delivery outcomes (predictability, visibility) with behavioral outcomes (ownership, collaboration, accountability), ensuring that change would sustain beyond the transformation phase.
Body / Analysis: NextAgile’s Transformation Approach
We structured the change in a phased, layered manner balancing tactical victories with systemic changes. Here’s what we did, and why these actions were important.
Phase 1: Coaching & Role Definition
What We Did:
Deployed coaches with distinct remit: Scrum Masters were trained (not only in ceremonies, but in leadership, servant-leader attitude) as opposed to task trackers.
Product Owners trained in methods such as requirement elicitation: mind mapping, discovery sessions for future projects.
Leadership classes for technical leaders – to enhance decision-making, conflict resolution, and leading teams.
This phase emphasized capability-building over ceremony enforcement, ensuring roles evolved from task execution to decision ownership and servant leadership.
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