Agile Product Delivery

The correct answer is: The iteration where the Feature is successfully delivered.

According to SAFe planning standards, the Program Board is used to visualize when value will be delivered and to identify dependencies. Feature cards are placed in the specific Iteration column where the team anticipates completing the work. This placement allows the Art Train to visualize exactly when the Feature's value is available.

The other options are incorrect. Placing the card at the beginning of the work or in the middle iteration does not accurately communicate when the Feature will be ready for release or integration. Furthermore, while Release on Demand is a goal, the planning board itself is structurally divided into Iterations, not release cycles.

The correct answer is: It reveals the sensory and emotional environment of the customer to identify profound underlying needs.

In SAFe Design Thinking, an Empathy Map is a tool used to synthesize research and build a deeper understanding of the user. While Personas provide a fictional representation of the user's traits and characteristics, an Empathy Map dives into the user's subjective experience. It typically organizes observations into quadrants (See, Hear, Think/Feel, Say/Do) to help teams infer the user's emotional state and uncover latent needs that standard profiles might miss.

Why the other answers are incorrect:

• Outlining the chronological steps and touchpoints describes a Customer Journey Map, which focuses on the process of a user engaging with a solution to achieve a goal.
• Defining fictional characters that represent target audience segments refers to Personas, which function as the standard user profiles mentioned in the question.
• Establishing technical features relates to defining Solution Intent or nonfunctional requirements, rather than exploring the user's problem space and mindset.

The correct answer is that prioritization relies on validating value hypotheses through continuous exploration and deep user empathy.

In a customer-centric enterprise using the Scaled Agile Framework (SAFe), decision-making is fundamentally driven by understanding the customer's needs and validating assumptions about value before committing to full implementation. Continuous Exploration allows the organization to foster innovation and build alignment on what should be built. By using design thinking and empathizing with the user, enterprises ensure that the features moving through the pipeline actually solve real user problems and deliver desirable outcomes.

While capacity alignment, strategic milestones, and technical feasibility are relevant aspects of planning and execution, they are constraint-based or scheduling factors rather than the primary customer-centric filter for determining which features to advance based on value.