The Courage to Descale – Delivered by Austrian Post, by Victoria Pichler & Team
Details
Summary:
Austrian Post started its scaled agile journey in 2019 with SAFe. For a traditional, process-heavy organization, it was a helpful first step — but after three years, the structure had become overly complex: overlapping roles, bloated meetings, and long, centralized planning cycles. The framework designed to bring agility had, in our context, started to limit it.
That realization led us to PRIME – the Post Rolling Refinement Model. PRIME isn’t a new framework; it’s a lightweight, LeSS-inspired way of working that emerged from stripping away unnecessary layers and giving teams back ownership.
We shortened the planning cycle from five to three sprints and replaced the big-room PI Planning with continuous rolling refinement, increasing flow and feedback.
We reduced roles to just four key ones (Teams, Train Coach, Head of Product, Head of Engineering), creating clearer accountability.
We realigned trains along real value streams, cutting coordination overhead.
And we made participation trust-based, not mandatory — inviting autonomy while maintaining transparency.
The results were encouraging: after a short dip, our success rate rose well above previous SAFe levels, and feedback showed higher ownership and motivation among teams. PRIME has since also proven effective in our AI Center of Excellence, where quick experimentation and adaptation are crucial.
Bios:
Victoria Pichler
Victoria Pichler is an Agile Coach at Austrian Post with over ten years of experience supporting teams and leaders on their agile journey. With a background in project and portfolio management, she combines a pragmatic mindset with a deep understanding of organizational change. As a co-driver of Austrian Post’s agile transformation and its in-house approach “PRIME,” she focuses on creating environments where teams can grow through autonomy, purpose, and trust.
Martin Eder
Martin Eder is an Agile Coach at Austrian Post with over fourteen years of experience in agile environments. After seven years as a Scrum Master, he now supports large teams in navigating scaled agile frameworks and strengthening autonomy at scale. As a co-driver of Austrian Post’s agile transformation and its in-house approach “PRIME,” he focuses on creating environments where teams can grow through autonomy, purpose, and trust.
Tomas Herda
Tomas Herda is an Agile Coach at the AI Center of Excellence within Group IT at Austrian Post and leads the ‘AI and Agile’ conference initiative. He holds a Master’s degree in Applied Informatics from the Slovak University of Technology. His expertise focuses on integrating Generative AI and Agile practices within software engineering. He contributes through R&D on multi-agent AI systems, co-authors papers, speaks at events on AI and prompting, and actively supports agile transformation. He is the author of Prompting Blueprints, an open-source playbook on GitHub with reusable prompt patterns, AI tool tutorials, guides & use cases, and served as Workshop Chair for ‘AI and Agile Software Development: From Frustration to Success’ at XP2025.