The model can help you to understand how things are done at Spotify, but it is not something that you should copy in your own organization.įloryan mentioned the organizational culture model by Edgar Schein, which indicates that you can only see a small part of the culture.Ĭulture is also an abstraction, yet the forces that are created in social and organisational situations deriving from culture are powerful. He suggested to looking at the Spotify model as a simplified description of a system or process. This is not the most useful way to look at the Spotify model, said Floryan imitating is a really tricky path to take. This can result in a halo effect bias, argues Floryan, where people look at something which is successful and expect to be successful when they do the same in their company. People look at the Spotify model as an example to follow or imitate. This is a summary of his talk there is no Spotify model.
SPOTIFY NEWS IN 2016 SOFTWARE
Marcin Floryan, chapter lead at Spotify, spoke at Spark the Change London 2016 about Spotify's current approach to product and software development. This board with bets is open to everyone in the company. (.) Spotify maintains a board with company bets the things that they have to do right now. DIBBs are applied for both strategy and culture. DIBBs are "things that we believe about the world, where we want to understand why we believe it" said Frödin. Spotify uses a concept that they call Data Insights Beliefs Bets (DIBBs). Marcus Frödin, director of engineering at Spotify, explained the framework for adopting the culture at Spotify in Spotify wants to be good at failing: Always make sure teams have access to their stakeholders and know their purpose. You can have both, but you need to work for it, said Lindwall and Hazell. Overall, Spotify aims to have a culture of highly autonomous, well aligned teams. Boundaries come in forms of clarity and constraints, something that you should aim to make as explicit as you can (often together with the teams themselves). Kristian Lindwall and Cliff Hazell from Spotify explained in a 2015 conference talk why autonomy is at the heart of agility in the InfoQ interview role of autonomy in agility:Īutonomy has a Greek origin it means having the freedom to choose. One of the core guiding principles at Spotify is autonomy. And we have a relatively high tolerance for inefficiency in the name of making sure that we are doing the right thing. So our approach is what futurist Warren Benes calls an ad-hocracy, which is an organization that is intentionally designed for flexibility and adaptation, and is maybe less concerned about extracting every last dollar of every activity that you engage in, and what this means is that we have, as I talked about, a relatively high tolerance for failure. Our constraints are different, the boundaries of our work are different, the fact that in an early stage startup you just kind of know everybody and everybody does everything, that’s not really feasible in an organization the size that Spotify has gotten to be- about fifteen hundred people now, seven hundred in tech product and design. The problems that a company like Spotify faces on a day-to-day basis trying to serve twenty million daily active users are just widely different from the problems that a startup trying to find its market faces. In the 2015 InfoQ interview learning fast at Spotify, Simon Marcus explains how Spotify tries to grow up and mature without losing their founding spirit and culture: There is no one way in which software is developed at Spotify Spotify encourages their employees to learn and adapt their way of working continuously. Spotify has been growing and the way that software is developed keeps on changing. We have been growing for three years, and the way we work today has evolved naturally over time. It wasn’t a big re-make, more like a continuous stream of small iterative improvements to our organization and process. Their 2012 paper provided a snapshot of the way of working at that time at Spotify, as Kniberg explained in the InfoQ interview scaling agile at spotify: The way that Spotify develops software was first described by Henrik Kniberg and Anders Ivarsson in Scaling Agile Spotify with Tribes, Squads, Chapters & Guilds. There is no one way in which software is developed at Spotify. It changes all the time as people at Spotify learn and discover new things. The Spotify model can help you to understand how things are done at Spotify, but you shouldn’t copy it in your own organization.