Facilitating SAFe Strategy Workshops: A Guide for Transformation Leaders

Blog Author

Siddharth

Published

5 Jun, 2025

Strategic alignment doesn’t happen by chance—it requires deliberate planning, thoughtful facilitation, and the ability to bring people together around a shared direction. That’s where SAFe® Strategy Workshops come into play. These workshops help leadership teams identify, shape, and align around a shared vision that drives enterprise agility.

For transformation leaders, facilitating SAFe strategy workshops is not just about following a template. It involves navigating complex organizational dynamics, enabling constructive dialogue, and ensuring outcomes turn into actionable plans. This post walks through how to effectively plan and facilitate these workshops—and how they connect to broader SAFe roles and capabilities.

Why Strategy Workshops Matter in a SAFe Transformation

In any SAFe implementation, alignment between strategy and execution is foundational. Organizations that skip structured strategic planning often suffer from misaligned teams, unclear priorities, and conflicting goals. A well-run strategy workshop helps:

Define a clear strategic intent
Align business and technology leadership
Identify key outcomes and value streams
Prioritize epics that deliver the most value
Prepare the enterprise for PI Planning and execution

These sessions are typically held before launching or re-aligning Agile Release Trains (ARTs) and should be repeated as part of a regular cadence, aligned with Portfolio or Value Stream planning.

Who Should Facilitate: The Role of the Transformation Leader

A transformation leader may be a SAFe Program Consultant (SPC), Release Train Engineer (RTE), or Lean Portfolio Management (LPM) stakeholder. Their job is to guide the room—ensuring clarity, flow, and value generation from the session.

If you’ve completed the Leading SAFe Certification, you likely understand how to create a shared vision and align Lean-Agile leadership. This foundation is essential when orchestrating strategic discussions across business and IT.

Preparing for a SAFe Strategy Workshop

Effective facilitation begins with solid preparation. Here's a checklist transformation leaders should consider:

1. Clarify the Workshop Goals

What needs to be achieved? Common goals include:

Establishing strategic themes
Mapping value streams
Clarifying the current state vs. desired future
Creating a Lean Budget Guardrail structure

2. Gather the Right People

Invite cross-functional leadership, including:

Portfolio owners
Epic owners
Value stream leaders
Product Managers and Product Owners
System Architects

If you’re working with SAFe Product Owner/Product Manager (POPM) certified professionals, their input will be vital when prioritizing value streams and capabilities.

3. Prepare Strategic Inputs

Ensure the following data points are ready:

Customer insights
Financials
Operational metrics
Existing OKRs or strategic goals
Market trends

This aligns with the concept of outcome-based planning described by Scaled Agile.

Running the Workshop: Step-by-Step Guide

Step 1: Set the Context

Begin by establishing why the strategy session is happening. Share enterprise goals, current pain points, and outcomes expected from the session. A SAFe Scrum Master or facilitator should ensure psychological safety and timeboxing for every discussion.

Step 2: Review Vision and Strategic Themes

This part defines where the business is heading. Focus on:

Customer-centric value
Emerging technologies
Competitive differentiators
Operational excellence

Use structured brainstorming, Lean Coffee, or voting techniques to drive consensus.

Step 3: Value Stream Identification or Review

Map how value flows across the organization. Use SAFe’s Value Stream Identification Workshop format and support the session with individuals certified in SAFe Release Train Engineer (RTE), as they understand value stream coordination deeply.

Step 4: Capability and Epic Discovery

Facilitate a discussion on the capabilities needed to deliver strategic outcomes. Introduce high-level epics and clarify which need further elaboration in the Portfolio Kanban.

Product Owners and Product Managers play a key role here. Teams with SAFe POPM certification are equipped to handle backlog shaping and MVP identification at this stage.

Step 5: Set Leading Indicators and OKRs

Every strategy needs a way to track progress. Use OKRs to define outcome-focused goals. Make sure these OKRs align with Portfolio and ART-level outcomes.

You can refer to the OKRs in SAFe whitepaper for practical examples on formulating effective metrics.

Facilitator Tips: Driving Engagement and Clarity

Use timeboxes to keep energy and decisions flowing
Visualize everything using canvases, sticky notes, or digital whiteboards
Park off-topic discussions and revisit later
Balance power dynamics—ensure everyone’s voice is heard
Summarize regularly—what’s decided, what’s pending

If you’re trained in the SAFe Advanced Scrum Master program, you'll be more comfortable managing facilitation in complex, cross-team settings.

After the Workshop: Turning Strategy into Execution

Facilitation doesn’t end when the meeting wraps up. As a transformation leader, you must ensure:

Workshop outcomes are documented and distributed
Portfolio Kanban is updated
Epics are handed over to Epic Owners for refinement
Value stream teams are aligned ahead of PI Planning

Follow-through is where most strategies fail. Build a cadence for inspecting and adapting strategic progress using Lean Portfolio Management syncs.

Key Outcomes to Track

Defined or updated strategic themes
Mapped value streams
A prioritized list of business epics
Clear OKRs or metrics tied to business value
Action plan for upcoming PI or ART launches

These deliverables ensure continuity from strategy to backlog and, eventually, to customer-delivered value.

Final Thoughts

Strategy workshops in SAFe aren’t just a formality—they are a practical space for organizations to reflect, prioritize, and align. For transformation leaders, mastering the art of facilitation is critical to keeping momentum and delivering outcomes that matter.

Whether you’re leading from a Leading SAFe perspective or coordinating with SAFe Scrum Masters and RTEs, strategic workshops are your opportunity to turn vision into movement.

By building the right environment, inviting the right voices, and guiding conversations toward meaningful decisions, you’ll not only enable SAFe success—you’ll enable transformation.

Also read - Running Effective SAFe Workshops to Align Business and Technology Leaders

Also see - Building a Shared Vision: How Cross-Functional Teams Align on SAFe Goals