In large-scale Agile environments, like those following the SAFe framework, collaboration isn’t just a nice-to-have—it’s what keeps everything moving. When you’re working with both business and enabler epics in a portfolio, coordinating multiple roles—Business Owners, Product Managers, Epic Owners, and Agile teams—can feel like you’re herding cats. Everyone’s got their own priorities, which sometimes seem to push—or even pull—the organization in opposite directions. The interesting part, though, is how Agile principles can actually help smooth out these friction points and build unity across all these viewpoints.
At the portfolio level, big strategic decisions get broken down into two main kinds of epics: business and enabler epics. Business epics are about that high-level work that delivers concrete value to the customer or the market, while enabler epics are often more behind-the-scenes. Those usually involve infrastructure work, technical debt, or architectural improvements that might not be customer-facing but are necessary to keep everything running smoothly. The tension we’ve all felt is between getting those new features out the door and actually keeping the system healthy under the hood. Both types of epics are equally important, but they require different perspectives and coordination across teams.
Here’s the thing—without cross-functional collaboration, these two epic types can get misaligned quickly. That’s where role-based collaboration comes into play, and it’s non-negotiable. You need Business Owners and Product Managers advocating for customer value, while Epic Owners and technical leads make sure the enablers are getting the attention they deserve. When these roles come together with an Agile mindset, things start to flow more smoothly.
Let’s start with the collaboration between Business Owners and Epic Owners. It’s easy for them to end up talking past each other: Business Owners pushing for that dazzling new feature set, while Epic Owners insist the system can’t support another feature until some technical debt has been addressed. When both sides operate in isolation, teams feel the squeeze—tasks get slapped in mid-sprint, and dependencies spiral out of control. Agile practices, though, offer some great ways to cut through this noise. The transparency of value streams, for instance, keeps everyone focused on the broader organizational objectives. When leaders across roles have shared access to visual boards, like a Portfolio Kanban, it becomes much easier to communicate the “why” behind certain work and prioritize what matters most — whether that’s an exciting new feature or a much-needed architectural upgrade.
But here’s where it can get tricky: managing dependencies. If Business Owners and Epic Owners don’t understand how their areas of focus intersect, teams can wind up stuck in a web of dependencies that wasn’t apparent upfront. Agile offers a way through this, too. Practices like PI (Program Increment) Planning bring everyone together regularly to map out upcoming work—and more importantly—surface any dependencies before they become problems. PI Planning isn’t just about making a plan, it’s about facilitating those critical conversations between all the players involved. When dependencies are identified early, teams have the freedom to negotiate trade-offs, ensuring that business needs and enabler work are balanced in a way that makes sense.
Of course, Agile doesn’t remove all the complexity from large-scale collaboration. Balancing technical health and business value feels like a juggling act at times, and priorities can shift quickly. But one of the most effective approaches I’ve seen involves fostering a sense of shared ownership. Instead of segmenting “business” and “technical” work into silos, Agile practices encourage a shared focus on outcomes. Frequent retrospectives at multiple levels—team, program, even portfolio—help to keep priorities aligned, enabling continuous feedback and adjustment.
This kind of collaboration requires more than just regular meetings, though. It takes trust and openness between all the roles involved. Without it, those silos can grow back, and everyone reverts to working in their own lane, leading to bottlenecks or blind spots.
Now, we can’t talk about collaboration without addressing how Agile really gets teams — and roles — talking in a productive way. Communication in Agile isn’t just about attending meetings or sending status updates. It’s this whole concept of transparent, frequent interaction that breaks down barriers. When you’re dealing with business and enabler epics, the goal is to keep those lines of communication wide open because priorities and dependencies shift constantly. If Business Owners and Product Managers are waiting until the next quarterly meeting to align with the Epic Owners, you’re in for a world of hurt.
This is where things like backlog refinement become invaluable. Many teams treat it as another checkbox, but it’s got so much more potential. It’s a living space for collaboration, a space to discuss the impact of not just stories but epics at the portfolio level. You’re constantly vetting the strategy behind the work and asking tough questions: Which epics are driving business value? Which enabler epics might have been overlooked but will support the next set of features? When this activity involves everyone—from Agile teams to portfolio leaders—you start seeing better decision-making across the board. No more reactive workarounds when unanticipated dependencies arise mid-sprint.
Another tool I’ve seen really help smooth large-scale collaboration is the use of release trains, or better yet, Agile Release Trains (ARTs) in the SAFe framework. This grouping of multiple Agile teams working towards shared objectives can dramatically improve alignment at both a technical and business level. Traditional waterfall methods blocked this kind of cross-functional interaction, but ARTs bring the engineers and business folks together in a structured, yet flexible way. It’s all about breaking that business-tech divide for good; you’re no longer pushing features in a silo while hoping someone else is clearing the technical debt behind the scenes.
A key piece of advice I always share is that collaboration shouldn’t stop at formal events like planning or refinement. Informal interactions—think daily check-ins between Product Managers and Epic Owners, ad-hoc discussions to clarify a scope change—are often where the magic happens. That’s the glue that keeps everything together day-to-day while fostering more agility overall. These conversations build trust between roles, so when a tough call needs to be made, people are more willing to compromise or share a new perspective.
Dependency management is where Agile portfolios can sometimes unravel if collaboration isn’t tightly woven into the fabric of how you work. It’s not enough to simply identify dependencies on a Kanban board or during PI Planning. You’ll get stuck if those dependencies aren’t regularly revisited and adjusted. This ties back to the importance of consistent communication—dependencies are inherently dynamic, meaning they change as work unfolds. Agile teams may forget this because clarity doesn’t always come at the beginning.
Epic Owners especially need to play a pivotal role here. They’re steering both business and enabler epics, which means they sit at the intersection of long-term strategy and real-time progress. If an enabler epic is held up because its dependency fishhooks into an active business feature, that needs to be flagged early—before it leads to a complete derailment of momentum. With close collaboration between those key roles, you enable faster adjustments around these dependencies without increasing the workload stress on delivery teams.
One of the biggest difficulties in larger Agile environments is preventing the silo mentality. That frame of mind where technical folks just focus on enablers, and business teams only look at external outputs. This is where the Agile mindset comes in. The beauty of Agile is how it encourages a collective effort to drive continuous improvement. No one’s work is more valuable than anyone else’s—it’s just different in terms of focus.
When you cultivate an Agile mindset across the organization, collaboration stops being a formal task, or worse, lip service, and becomes the default way of working. It transforms from a “me vs. them” dynamic into a united effort to resolve blockers, track dependencies, and deliver what actually matters.
At the end of the day, cross-functional collaboration around business and enabler epics is the cornerstone of an Agile portfolio. It’s where value gets delivered exponentially, not just incrementally. When Business Owners and Epic Owners aren’t just working together during planning but are in regular sync, adjusting as they go, that’s when Agile portfolios truly hum. There aren’t silver bullets, no magic process that eliminates all challenges, but fostering the right conditions—deep transparency, genuine collaboration, and a shared commitment to agility—will get you pretty darn close.