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Feature State Cards

Struggling to prepare your Features?

A great, pocket-sized guide and checklist to help ensure you put just the right amount of effort into describing Features for your upcoming planning event. 

The cards and why youu should use them, are explained in a super helpful four-part article series (see below) by our hugely experienced SAFe Fellow, Ian Spence. One of our most popular downloaded coaching tools! You can download these for free below.

Free to Download Feature State Cards Image

Part 1: The Danger of Waterfall Thinking: Just Enough, Just in Time is Actually Very Little

A lot of work goes into the continuous refinement of a product’s backlog. This is true as much for Feature Backlogs as it is for Story backlogs. When using SAFe® it often seems that too much work goes into preparing the Features and getting them ready for PI Planning…

Image of Waterfall Behaviours

Part 2: The Seven Deadly Sins of Feature Preparation

So what are the worst things you can do to compromise the agility of your program when using Features? Here are the seven deadly sins of feature preparation, the most wasteful practices we have seen teams adopt in an attempt to be better prepared for the PI Planning event…

Seven Deadly Sins of Feature Preparation  image

Part 3: What Does it Mean for a Feature to be Ready?

So what does it mean for a Feature to be “Ready”? And just as importantly when do they need to be “Ready”?**

As many people have observed (Read Mike Cohn’s article) Definition of Ready can be a dangerous thing leading to waterfall behavior and strict hand-overs between Product Owners and their teams…

SAFe Feature Ready State - card for download image

Part 4: Some Practical Tips to Avoid Waterfalling Features

As indicated in the ‘Ready’ checklist presented in the previous article in this series, there are many practical things that can be done to prepare the Features prior to the PI planning event. As previously discussed we do not want to break the Features up into a comprehensive or definitive set of stories prior to the PI planning event…

Tips to avoid waterfalling features - image

Download our Feature State Cards

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