SAFe has many concepts across its levels-strategic themes, epics, solutions, value stream, MVPs, MMFs, capabilities, stories & several backlogs.
While SAFe nobly attempts to present all needed concepts it does not explicitly call out the most important one–the smallest chunk of work that will provide the most value for the time it takes to build it. We call this the Minimum Business Increment (MBI). It is very similar to Denne& Cleland-Huang’s Minimum Marketable Feature (MMF), which, unfortunately, SAFe changed original meaning of to represent “the minmimum functionality that the teams can build to learn whether the benefit hypothesis is valid or not.” This concept is already part of Agile which always suggest to build in vertical slices to test our hypothesis.
SAFe definitely intends to have the concept of the MBI, but its use of overloaded &redefined terms make it hard to see. MBIs encapsulate the intention of solutions, MVPs, capabilities & SAFe’s re-defined MMFs. Realizing this can simplify SAFe by starting with initiatives that are consistent with our strategic themes & defining a sequence of business increments for them. These business initiatives can then be refined into MBIs which create the context for everything needed to manifest value.