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Description: A detailed overview of Spotify’s innovative strategy for scaling its team by building numerous autonomous squads that function as independent mini-startups.
A detailed overview of Spotify’s innovative strategy for scaling its team by building numerous autonomous squads that function as independent mini-startups.
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Scaling Agile @ Spotify
with Tribes, Squads, Chapters & Guilds
Henrik Kniberg & Anders IvarssonOct 2012 Dealing with multiple teams in a product development organization is always a challenge! One of the most impressive examples we’ve seen so far is Spotify, which has kept an agile mindset despitehaving scaled to over 30 teams across 3 cities.Spotify is fascinating company that is transforming the music industry. The company has only existed 6years and already has over 15 million active users and over 4 million paying. The product itself can belikened to “a magical music player in which you can instantly find and play every song in the world”. Alistair Cockburn (one of the founding fathers of agile software development) visited Spotify and said “Nice– I’ve been looking for someone to implement this matrix format since 1992 🙂 so it is really welcome to see.” So how is this managed? We have both presented at conferences and been caught in engaging discussions around how we work atSpotify and how the company handles agile with hundreds of developers. Many people are fascinated bythis, so we decided to write an article about it.
Disclaimer:
Spotify is (like any good agile company) evolving fast. This article is only a snapshot of our current way of working – a journey in progress, not a journey completed. By the time you read this, thingshave already changed.
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Squads
The basic unit of development at Spotify is the
Squad
. A Squad is similar to a Scrum team, and is designed to feel like a mini-startup. They sit together, and theyhave all the skills and tools needed to design, develop, test, and release to production. They are a self-organizing team and decide their own way of working – some use Scrum sprints, some use Kanban, someuse a mix of these approaches. Each squad has a long-term mission such as building and improving the Android client, creating theSpotify radio experience, scaling the backend systems, or providing payment solutions. The picture belowillustrates how different squads take responsibility for different parts of the user experience.Squads are encouraged to apply Lean Startup principles such as MVP (minimum viable product) andvalidated learning. MVP means releasing early and often, and validated learning means using metrics and A/B testing to find out what really works and what doesn’t. This is summarized in the slogan “Think it, buildit, ship it, tweak it”.
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Because each squad sticks with one mission and one part of the product for a long time, they can reallybecome experts in that area – for example what it means to build an awesome radio experience. Most squads have an awesome workspace including a desk area, a lounge area, and a personal “huddle”room. Almost all walls are whiteboards. We’ve never seen a better collaboration space!
yes, that’s a shark flying around. perfectly normal.
To promote learning and innovation, each squad is encouraged to spend roughly 10% of their timeon “hack days”. During hack days people do whatever they want, typically trying out new ideas and sharingwith their buddies. Some teams do 1 hack day every second week, others save up for a whole “hack week”.Hack days are not only fun, they are also a great way to stay up-to-date with new tools and techniques andsometimes lead to important product innovations!
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