What Is Spotify Agile Scaling?

Scaling agility and culture: the case of Spotify

The model of scaling agility is based on people and culture. It has helped increase innovation and productivity by focusing on accountability and quality. A Guild is a community of interest if team members are passionate about a topic.

Anyone can join a guild. Guilds can cross different tribes. There is no leader of the guild.

Someone raises their hand to be the Guild Coordination. The people at Spotify were given as much freedom as possible to pivot quickly. Allowing teams to pick their own development tools and modifying another team's code are just some examples.

The Tribe of Spotify

The basic unit of development at Spotify is the squad. A squad is similar to a scrum team and is designed to be small. Each squad can be up to 12 people.

Each squad is dedicated to a specific area. Everyone in a squad has the skills and tools needed to design, develop, test, and release into production. The squad has a long-term mission.

The squads always have an agility coach that helps improve their way of working. The feature area is defined by a product owner. Multiple squad that work on a related feature area make a tribe.

The Tribe can be seen as a hub for mini-startups. The tribe has a lot of freedom. A tribe should have a maximum of 100 people.

Each tribe has a lead who is responsible for creating a productive environment for the squad. The tribe lead can be part of the squad in the same office. Tribe leaders pay close attention to the squad dependency and analyze how it is affecting the squad.

The Interpersonal Network

The most basic unit of the model is the squad. They are similar to the Agile team in that they are made up of 6 to 12 people working together on a specific feature area. For more efficiency, their work is self-contained, so that progress doesn't get hampered by external tasks.

The tribe is kept in close contact with all relevant stakeholders. Multiple squad work together on related missions and features in the tribes. They can comprise up to 150 members.

They still retain some degree of independence, but are placed under the authority of one or more tribe leads. Tribe leads can be part of a squad. They are responsible for fostering collaboration and teamwork.

Identifying and removing cross-tribe dependencies is one of the main aspects of their work. The chapter lead is usually a senior developer. The other members of the chapter are helped by the latter to become even better specialists.

System owners are responsible for keeping the system sane. If no one works behind the scenes to keep them up and running, their overall coherence may degrade. System owners are people who dedicate time to updating and fixing a system.

The Engineering Culture of the Service

The engineering culture chooses community, trust and motivation over structure and control. The team decides what to build, how to build, and how to cooperate while building it, which is a key to motivating people. squads are cross-functional groups that focus on a specific area.

The squads are made up of 6 to 12 people and have all the skills and tools needed to design, develop, test, and release features. The same purpose is given to guilds and chapters. They both want to promote transparency, alignment, and motivation.

Guilds are where members from any squad, chapter, or tribe can come together to share knowledge. Hackathons are much like workshops, which are usually conducted by guilds. The architecture of the service kept releases independent.

The shift allowed for frequent releases. The squad is able to ship software quickly and with minimal hassle. Teams can improve their ways of working with resources from Spotify.

The SLAM Service

In 2008 the service was launched in Sweden. The most popular global audio streaming service is Spotify, with over 260 million users and over 125 million subscribers. They have 50 million tracks, including over one million titles for the podcast.

A guild is a lightweight community of interest. Continuous Delivery, Web Development, Leadership, and Web Development are some of the topics that are covered in this article. Anyone can join or leave a guild.

A guild has regular meet-ups. Release trains are releases that are done every 2 weeks on a Thursday. The release happens every time, even if there is not much ready.

The Agile Product Development Service (EPS)

The service was formed in 2008. It started as a Scrum organisation that was successful. The scaleability of the practices and the rigidity of the practices were questioned once the practices were embedded into the organisation.

The Agile principles are a must for the framework. The principles are the pillars that drive the organisation and not the practices or the people. Ensuring that the three pillars are prominently featured in the way the project is done is important to keeping the quality of the product and engaging the whole team on what needs to be done and how.

Everyone within the scrum team is focused on the clear objective - sprint goal. The values are used by all team members to deliver a increment of 'Done'. The values can be achieved with the transparency of the work.

Each squad has its own mission and there is no leader in the squad team. The Agile Coach or Product Owner is the same as the developer. They're skills fit like a glove and they're motivated towards the team success.

Some of the squad teams may be working on a particular service area, while others may be working on infrastructure or delivery. A Chapter is formed by members of a squad in a single tribe with similar skills and tools and is considered the glue that keeps the organisation together. Each chapter will have a leader and members.

Spotify: The New Music Guild

The model consists of a team that does the work. The Squad has a Product Owner who is dedicated to the squad. Chapter members are encouraged to communicate constantly.

Each chapter has their own areas of expertise and they meet regularly to discuss their achievements and challenges. The organization is spread across locations by the Guild. Tools and practices are shared.

The guild can include other members who are interested. Guilds are usually focused on their area of expertise in a generic way. They have mailing lists, newsletters and un conferences.

The flexibility and simplicity of the Spotify Model has made it a popular buzzword. It suggests a community-based networking structure for the organization and focuses on the Agile Principles. It is a very unique and liberating model that requires the practitioners to be very careful and responsible while they are using it, so that it can be tailored for their specific organizational needs.

The Organizational Model of a Product Development Company

It is difficult to deal with multiple teams in a product development company. The music service is an example of how you can work with a large number of teams from different cities and quickly achieve success. The company was founded in 2006 in Sweden.

The company started as a start-up. It used a methodology called scrum to manage its projects. They applied a creative approach to accommodate the new scale without losing the Agile culture just when business took off and new hires started flooding the office.

The solution was called the Spotify model. Even though squad are autonomously aligned, it is important for specialists to align on best practices. Each specialist has a chapter that is a family.

It helps to keep engineering standards in place. Senior technology leads are usually the ones leading the chapters. They may be the team members' managers.

A guild may have members who are passionate about a topic. A guild will be interesting. There is no leader of the guild.

The Continuum Limit of the Tribes

The chapter is the next part of the building block. Chapter is a group that is meant to share knowledge, learn from each other, and reduce the effects of silo effect and sense of isolation. The main purpose of the chapter is to support and focus on nurturing, growth of chapter members as individuals and as a group, and that is what the Chapter Lead is supposed to do.

As the number of tribes grew, so did the amount of overlaps and touch points between them, which led to increased friction and slower movement. The Alliance building block was introduced once more to address those points. A support for a group of 2 or more tribes that have the same mission.

Towards an Agile Approach to the Cross-functional Collaboration of Organization

Many companies that use the Agile approach find it difficult to scale due to the complexity of their cultures, time zones, locations, and teams. Over the last 10 years, there have been several frameworks introduced to help with scaling Agile. The model is often referred to as the Spotify Model.

A squad is a cross-functional team made up of 6 to 12 individuals that are focused one feature area. Each squad has a unique mission that directs what they do and features an Agile coach for continued support and a product owner for guidance. The framework or methodology of the squad is determined.

The same feature areas are being coordinated by a collection of Squads. The tribes are made up of people from 40 to 150 and are supposed to make sure there is alignment across the squad. All Tribes have Tribe Leads who are tasked with helping to coordinate across all the Squads.

LeSS: A Framework for Scaling up Projects

With the development of new products and services getting larger and more complex, organizations are constantly investigating and exploring frameworks that will ensure initial business value, secure time and cost, and lower delivery risk. The popularity and superiority of the Agile frameworks are becoming evident due to the fast changes in technology and market innovations. The framework that Ken and his team developed is called the "Nexus" and it is a framework that implements scrum at scale across multiple teams.

Teams work in a common environment and are focused on producing a combined increment every sprint. LeSS is a framework for scaling up a project. Craig and Bas Vodde are the people who created LeSS.

The framework scales up with minimal additional process. Use as little process as possible to get multiple teams to work well. LeSS is a good starting point when you already have a scrum in place and are just starting to scale up with more teams.