Better Products
Customizing SAFe® with Digital Product Management – A Reality Check
Many organizations are adopting SAFe®—but how well does the framework really hold up in the day-to-day reality of digital products?
This presentation invites you to an honest, practical reality check: from discovering genuine value streams and working with a Minimum Survivable Transformation to tangible successes in the digital product environment, backed by insights from an internal survey and concrete experiences from the 1st Roadmap Forum, where cross-product and cross-program alignment became a tangible reality. We’ll also speak openly about friction points and areas for learning—especially where agile product logic meets traditional financial models.
The presentation is aimed at anyone who wants to boldly rethink SAFe® and shape product management to be dynamic, effective, and aligned with true agility.
The talk is held in German.
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Arnaud L'Hôte & Christian Scherer
Zurich Insurance
Arnaud L'Hôte is a SAFe® Practice Consultant Trainer (SPCT) and Senior Agile Coach at Zurich Insurance, where he drives the lean-agile transformation as part of the Lean Agile Center of Enablement (LACE).
Over 15+ years of leading large-scale agile transformations — the last five spent deep inside one of the world's largest insurers — Arnaud has launched and coached Agile Release Trains, built Lean Portfolio Management competencies with executive leadership, and helped shift organizations from command-and-control to Management 3.0. He knows firsthand how the complexity of insurance — legacy architectures, regulatory weight, and deeply siloed operations — makes or breaks a SAFe® adoption.
Before Zurich, Arnaud served as Managing Director of Flow Sphere AG and Principal Consultant at Zühlke Group, coaching enterprises across telecommunications and technology through their own agile turning points.
His message to this conference: start empowering digital product managers — they're the missing accelerator your SAFe® transformation has been waiting for.
Christian Scherer has been working in information technology for over 25 years, mainly in governance and management functions.
He was responsible for IT service management, strategy and project portfolio management at an insurance group throughout Europe. For several years, he has been intensively involved with agility in the scaled environment and is considered an expert in the implementation of lean portfolio management. He has built up several lean portfolios at Switzerland's largest retailer and played a key role in shaping their agile journey.
Since November 2022, Christian Scherer is responsible for Lean Portfolio Management at Zurich Insurance Company in Switzerland.