Spotify Model

The Spotify Model is a people-driven, autonomous framework for scaling agile. The model emphasizes the importance of culture and network and is implemented through Squads, Tribes, Chapters, and Guilds. The foundation of the model is the squad and it acts like a Scrum team.

Benefits and Challenges

Benefits

• Autonomy: The results across many companies speak for themselves; autonomous work is the future of successful agile product development. The main benefit of the Spotify model is that teams are empowered to make their own decisions and work in the way that best suits them. This encourages transparency, trust, collaboration, and experimentation, leading to better products.
• Fewer bottlenecks and red tape: When teams run themselves and make their own decisions, they’re able to work faster and avoid time-wasting bottlenecks. The model encourages informal gathering and information sharing, without too much ceremony or formal process.

Challenges

• Risk to system architecture: Spotify has 100 distinct systems which form the overall product. When squads update one, they usually need to update several to implement the changes they’ve been working on. The risk here is that the architecture can go awry if everyone is only focusing on a small chunk of it at a time. Having a System Owner, someone (or a pair of someones) who owns the integrity of the architecture, mitigates this risk.
• It won’t work for every company: The model looks fantastic from the outside, but choosing to implement it simply because it worked for Spotify is a mistake. The model fits the company culture, which is much more difficult to change than the framework you’re following. Rearranging the structure of your company is a big risk and a huge investment, and because the Spotify model was not designed to be copied by other companies, it may not be a good fit for yours.

Spotify Model Best Practices

If you’re looking to enable a culture of trust, autonomy, and rapid learning, you can’t go wrong looking to the Spotify model for inspiration. If your organization is looking at the Spotify model as a means to help you approach agile at scale, the following is a list of best practices to keep in mind.

• Don’t copy the model: Seek to understand the structure, practices, and mindset behind Spotify’s approach. With that understanding, tweak the aspects of the model to fit your own environment. Your goal is not to be Spotify, but to leverage their model to improve how your organization works together.
• Autonomy and trust is key: Spotify gave as much autonomy as possible to their people in order to help them pivot quickly. Allowing teams to pick their own development tools and modify another team's code are just some examples. Within your organization, determine if there are decisions that can be pushed to the teams instead of being mandated by parts of the organization that are disconnected from the day-to-day work.
• Transparency with community: Spotify’s success is credited to their focus on building community and transparency around their work. Establish your first Guild around the Spotify model adoption and encourage participation from everyone in the organization. Build trust by creating transparent, inclusive ways to gather feedback, and gain alignment on how your organization wants to work in the future.
• Encourage mistakes: You will fall down and stumble in this journey. But that’s okay. Improvement involves experimenting and learning from both our successes and failures. Spotify went through many iterations before they attained the model we know today, and have since continued to experiment to constantly look for new ways to improve the way they work. Encourage the same within your organization!

If you focus on these practices you’ll see positive impacts on how your organization collaborates and aligns, whether or not you use the Spotify model as a guide.