Dealing with multiple teams in a product development organization is always a challenge!
One of the most impressive examples I’ve seen so far is Spotify. I’ve had the pleasure of working with Spotify on and off ever since the company was founded, and it’s one of the few companies I’ve seen with a truly agile culture. Spotify has grown a lot lately and now has hundreds of developers divided into 30 agile teams spread over 4 cities in 3 timezones. So how is this managed?
Check out the article: Scaling Agile @ Spotify with Tribes, Squads, Chapters and Guilds. I wrote it together with Anders Ivarsson, one of the agile coaches that I’m working with (Spotify has a truly awesome group of coaches!).
Translations:
47 Comments
Very interesting reading. Thanks Henrik and Anders for publishing it .
How that snapshot of Spottify way of working emerged in the time, what forces where at work and who contributed ?
Are there differences in practices, way of working, organization among different squads or different tribes ? What caused them ?
Luca
[...] Hur Spotify jobbar agilt [blog.crisp.se] 0 poäng | Postat november 15 av Erik Starck [...]
great article. especially the idea of “a guild” as a crossteam entity. a cool name for a cool idea.
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Very interesting reading…
I face similar challenges being responsible for the development of direct channels in a major Belgian Bank.
One question I’m still left with: how do you deal with maintainance on delivered software especially if this adds up to about 30% of all work. Separate it in a separate squad?
Squads do their own maintainance. There’s no handoff to another squad, that’s just expensive and breaks the learning loop. Programmers need to live with the consequences of their design decisions.
Great post! One thing I was surprised with is the “operation” squad which seems to be not a feature team. Also aren’t the members of this squad disappointed being a “servant” team and not producing the external features?
The people in ops do ops stuff because it is their job, because that is what they love doing, and that is why they came to Spotify to do it. The ops folks are heros, they enable everyone else to put stuff into production, and keep the systems running 24/7.
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[...] process on this site’s What is the role of a product owner? page. His recent post about the way Spotify structures a large Agile team is fascinating. Share this:FacebookEmail Posted in Uncategorized Recent [...]
[...] of the people who’ve bred this strange animal have taken the time to write up the organizational methods and thinking that go …. It makes for interesting reading, much more than I can achieve, and it’s also quite brief [...]
[...] How Spotify Works Posted by Code Monkey on November 22, 2012 While I wish I could write a long article on how Spotify works technically this is not what I want to tell you about today. Nor will I tell you how I would build Spotify if I had to, but that would be an interesting blog post. But today I want to tell you about a great article describing how Spotify has organized their teams, how they work and best of all; they have cool names for it too: Squads, Tribes, Chapters & Guilds! [...]
Hello Henrik,
It is a very interesting article. I have translated it into french :
Agilité à grande échelle chez Spotify
Regards,
Fabrice
Wow, thanks! I added a link to your translation.
Your article mentioned that user experience decisions were left to the squad, and I was curious how you’ve gone about staffing that need for each squad. That’s something that my organization has grappled with since adopting Scrum in 2004. We’ve waffled back-and-forth between putting user experience/design members on the teams and creating a central team composed entirely of functional design and user experience. Does every squad have a dedicated member for these functions? If not, how many squads do they typically get split across? Have any of your squad members taken on UX/design responsibilities with little or no prior experience? Do you encourage that?
We’re still waffling around with this, will have to get back on this topic later
)
Oh, good, it’s not just us
[...] http://blog.crisp.se/2012/11/14/henrikkniberg/scaling-agile-at-spotify Related Posts [...]
Great post! I really like the clearity both in the vertical(Sqaud, tribes) and horizontal(Guild, Chapter). Have some what the same type of setup in my organization but not that clear…
I really like the idea of “quarterly survey with each squad” a good tool help the team to be high performing.
Now to my question:
How is the process for a squad to take a new feature from customer requirement to production?
At what sync points do sqaud and stakeholders meet up?
Regards,
Christer
Great post and article, thanks for posting!! Could you share some information about any tooling is used to help facilitate/manage Spotify’s process(s)?
Great article. I translated it to Spanish:
Agilidad en Spotify
[...] This paper (PDF) tells the story on how Spotify organizes the work of tens of engineers and designers in an agile manner. [...]
I like this article!
I notice that the idea of “guilds” is spreading. Maybe you want to have a look at Jurgen’s post about that: http://www.noop.nl/2012/11/business-guilds.html
I practice this idea having cross-team (knowledge-) “domains” with experienced “domain owners” guiding and leading it.
[...] en spännande artikel om hur Spotify organiserat sin utveckling i något som liknar en matris synliggör Henrik Kniberg och Anders Ivarsson en viktig dimension vid [...]
Hi, Henrik!
This is link to Russian translation:
Масштабирование Agile в Spotify
Thanks Askhat! I added it to the list of translations above.
Great article thanks you. I love being a Scrum Master/Iteration Manager and I want to work for a company that has a true Agile Culture. Can you get my resume in front of them.
Cheers,
Carmen
Try http://www.spotify.com/jobs/
P.S. Happy New Year!
Interesting article. My question is how you support this process electronically? I like JIRA + green-hopper, but I am not sure it is the right one to support the full process.
Thanks,
Omar
[...] Masse an erfolgreichen agilen Transitionen noch nicht erreicht ist, so sind Erfolge wie bei SAP, Spotify und Xerox Indizien dafür, dass agile Entwicklung der richtige Weg sein [...]
Completely love it! This is the type of org I am constantly guiding companies toward but not always with success.
Thanks for providing a case study I can use to fuel my efforts.
Question: Can you share a sketch of a typical squad area floor plan? How is the desk area, lounge area, and a personal “huddle” room configured?
Thanks!
Here’s a sketch of a typical squad floorplan:
https://dl.dropbox.com/u/1018963/Articles/Spotify-TypicalSquadWorkspace.png
Thanks! That’s great. We have something similar. We have tables instead of desks and the tables face each other in an type of island.
One other question:
The quarterly survey – do you have an Excel template for that or do you just hand make all the arrow selection each quarter?
Thanks again!
[...] Respecto a otra forma de organizarse tengo pendiente de leer el famoso artículo de Henrik Kniberg sobre su trabajo en Spotify. [...]
[...] 대한 원래 문서는 이곳을 참조하면 볼 수 있다. Share this:더전자우편Print이것이 좋아요:좋아하기 [...]
[...] recently create a workspace layout for a client based on the team spaces used at Spotify, one of the shining beacons of organizational Agility. Ideal agile [...]
[...] recently created a workspace layout for a client based on the team spaces used at Spotify, one of the shining beacons of organizational Agility. Ideal agile [...]
[...] development team should be autonomous. A development team (or ‘squad’ in Spotify lingo – see http://blog.crisp.se/2012/11/14/henrikkniberg/scaling-agile-at-spotify) should always be able to move independently of other squads. Even if there is a dependency between [...]
There’s a Portuguese version at http://www.infoq.com/br/articles/spotify-escalando-agile but the link doesn’t seem to be here yet.
Thanks, I added the link now.
[...] Scaling Agile at Spotify and Daniel Pink’s Drive Posted on March 20, 2013 by Bart Vermijlen — No Comments ↓ FB.Event.subscribe('edge.create', function(response) { _gaq.push(['_trackEvent','SocialSharing','Facebook - like button',unescape(String(response).replace(/+/g, " "))]); }); Last November I was really amazed by an article from Henrik Kniberg – I admit, I’m a fan – on how he helped scaling agile at Spotify. [...]
[...] http://blog.crisp.se/2012/11/14/henrikkniberg/scaling-agile-at-spotify Share this: This entry was posted in Uncategorized and tagged Agile on April 10, 2013 by Gerrit Quast. [...]
[...] in November, Spotify released a paper titled Scaling Agile @ Spotify with Tribes, Squads, Chapters & Guilds. I recently had a chance to chat with Henrik Kniberg, one of the coaches on site, to ask him some [...]
[...] misses sent me an interesting article about Spotify’s Agile process and how they steer a technical team of over 250. This has probably no short term relevance to [...]
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[...] we organise our whole tech organisation, see Henrik Kniberg and Anders Ivarsson’s paper on Scaling Agile at Spotify. Share this:TwitterFacebook This entry was posted in Labs by fimblo. Bookmark the permalink. [...]