Let’s face it—when Agile’s applied at the portfolio level, things get a bit more complicated. Sure, you’ve got Agile teams sprinting away, but zoom out to the portfolio level, and you suddenly have layers of competing priorities, multiple stakeholders, and a heck of a lot more ambiguity around where to focus. This is where feedback loops, not just at the team level but fully integrated across the portfolio, can be game-changers.

One of the most common mistakes organizations make at scale is thinking that delivering epics and initiatives is a one-way street. We come up with a grand idea, teams break it down into smaller stories, work gets done, and somewhere at the very end of the process, we figure out if it actually worked. Too late, right? The beauty of Agile at any level is that learning and adapting should happen continuously, not just at the end of a cycle. Whether it’s from customer feedback, stakeholder insights, or even retrospectives, these feedback loops need to be at the heart of how we manage portfolio-level work.

So, what does integrating feedback loops at the portfolio level actually look like? For starters, it’s not just about looking at customer feedback after an epic is delivered. Portfolio teams need to think about it more holistically. It’s crucial to bake in checkpoints where you can gather, digest, and act on feedback not only from customers but from the stakeholders who have a vested interest in these big initiatives and the teams doing the actual work.

This sounds a bit abstract, so let me give you an example. Imagine you’re halfway through developing a major new feature set—something big, because this is portfolio-level stuff we’re talking about, right? Instead of waiting until it’s nearing completion to test it with users, you could introduce lightweight experiments early on. A quick prototype or MVP doesn’t just serve the dev teams; it gives real data back to the portfolio level on whether you’re moving in the right direction. On top of that, you’re collecting nuggets of feedback early, while there’s still plenty of time to pivot or adjust priorities without derailing the whole ship.

Here’s the reality, though—customers aren’t the only ones you get feedback from. At a portfolio level, stakeholder insight becomes just as important. Functional heads, marketing, finance—they all have perspectives that can shape the work. I can’t count the number of times I’ve seen portfolio-level initiatives miss the mark simply because someone forgot to have that conversation with marketing about brand messaging or with ops about scalability. Creating a formal feedback loop that integrates these perspectives keeps portfolio work grounded not just in customer value but in the wider company’s strategic needs.

And don’t forget about listening to your teams on the ground. You’re not just pulling epics from the air and handing them down like stone tablets. Teams are at the pulse of the delivery, and their insights during epic execution are the best way to make sure work stays aligned with the vision. I’ve found that regular portfolio-level retrospectives or syncs that include the team perspective often surface issues you would otherwise never hear about. These retrospectives are invaluable—you tap into what’s actually happening on the ground, whether teams are struggling with technical debt, or facing bottlenecks, or maybe they’ve just found a far simpler way to achieve the epic’s goal. The point is, those in the trenches are generating valuable data every sprint, and if you aren’t piping that into portfolio-level decisions, you’re bound to miss out.

But here’s the kicker: having all this feedback doesn’t mean much if it doesn’t feed directly into prioritization. A lot of organizations do a decent job collecting feedback but then don’t really integrate it into making decisions. That’s where you, as someone navigating the portfolio, have to take ownership. Real-time data from customer testing, stakeholder concerns, or learnings from team retrospectives should influence which epics stay at the top of the priority list and, just as importantly, which ones get parked or re-scoped.

I’ve seen portfolios where prioritization becomes a sort of inbox—things come in, get tagged important, and sit there, regardless of what feedback the teams are hearing in the market. You don’t want that. What works better? A flexible backlog at the portfolio level that gets reprioritized when meaningful inputs come in. When a team reports that an ongoing initiative is way more technically complex than initially understood, or a pilot customer trial falls flat, that’s your signal to revisit that epic. Maybe it needs more time, maybe it drops in priority, or perhaps you discover it’s not worth the investment at all based on the real-world data you have in hand.
Continuing from where we left off, integrating feedback loops at the portfolio level isn’t just about gathering insights from across the board—it’s about making sure those insights have weight when making decisions. Often what happens is, while everyone in the organization says they want to be agile, they’ll still cling to old ways of prioritizing initiatives, operating under the assumption that the big epics already in motion should just keep going no matter what feedback comes in. That’s where the real shift has to occur.

There’s a fine line between persistence and stubbornness. Portfolio-level work has to be flexible enough to adapt based on real-time feedback, not locked down by preconceived notions or sunk cost bias. And sometimes, killing or pivoting an epic halfway through is the best decision you can make, especially when data tells you the path you’re on isn’t going to lead where you thought. It’s a tough pill to swallow because a lot of teams put sweat equity into those epics, stakeholders have pitched them, and leadership likely attached some strong initial expectations. But being willing to learn and act from feedback is a cornerstone of Agile success.

Let’s take customer feedback, for instance. When you collect customer insights during early stages of an epic, you may find users are interacting with the feature in ways you didn’t anticipate. That’s invaluable because it helps adjust or even redefine the direction before you dump more resources into something that isn’t hitting the mark. But customer feedback alone can’t dictate all priorities. What often gets missed in the conversation is balancing this with input from stakeholders and the voice of your teams. A hit product feature is great, but if the technical team warns there’s major hidden complexity or technical debt mounting, that should influence your next move too.

The danger at the portfolio level is that feedback sometimes gets siloed. The customer feedback goes into one bucket, team retrospectives go into another, and stakeholders next to them. As a Scrum Master or someone guiding the portfolio effort, part of your job becomes ensuring these feedback streams aren’t operating in isolation. You’ve got to bring these voices into the same conversation.

Think about retrospectives at the team level, for example. That’s one of the richest sources of insight when it comes to understanding if a particular epic or initiative is actually flowing well—or if it’s a massive headache no one wants to admit. Teams work the closest to the code, the users, and the process. What they bring to the discussion around epics isn’t just about day-to-day impediments but often bigger, systemic issues or opportunities that leadership may not even be aware of.

One practical way to pull this all together is running portfolio-level retrospectives—yes, just like you do at the sprint level—which encompass feedback loops not just from teams, but from stakeholders and any customer data you’ve collected. These retrospectives should explore what’s going well across active epics, what’s proving to be a challenge, and whether previously held assumptions still stand up given the feedback received. You’d be surprised at how often an issue team-side can help reshape the bigger initiatives or reprioritize portfolio work in a way that aligns better with overall business goals.

At the end of the day, for feedback loops to drive portfolio decisions, everyone involved—from leadership to development teams—has to be okay with uncertainty. If you’re going to have feedback influence prioritization, you can’t pretend every decision is final. That’s really one of the biggest cultural hurdles Agile at scale faces. In practice, it takes a level of trust that’s sometimes hard to build in large organizations. Trust that leadership won’t view pivoting as a failure. Trust from the teams that their insights will actually impact decisions, rather than just getting discussed and forgotten. But when you crack that trust gap, when feedback isn’t just collected but applied—man, it really drives continuous improvement.

To wrap this up, think of portfolio-level feedback loops like a system of checks and balances that ensure your most valuable resources—time, people, and focus—are always directed where they can have the most impact. Done right, it’s not just the product that benefits. Teams feel heard, stakeholders get clarity, and customers ultimately get solutions that actually work for them. And that, to be honest, is what continuous improvement at scale should look like.