Spotify Rhythm – how we get aligned (slides from my talk at Agile Sverige)

Here are the slides from my talk about Spotify Rhythm at Agila Sverige.

The talk is about Spotify’s current approach to getting aligned as a company. It covers:

  • what problem we’re trying to solve, and how we’ve gone through two other models (OKR and Priorities & Achievements) before arriving at our current model
  • how we define “Bets” using the DIBB framework (Data-Insight-Belief-Bet)
  • how we prioritize bets using stack-ranking based on company beliefs and north star goals
  • how we visualize bets on a kanban-like company level board, and group them into Now – Next – Later columns
  • how different parts of the company visualize their own bets and align with higher level bets, using interlinked bet boards.
  • how we synchronize and prioritize our work using different cadences at different levels of the company.
  • how this model is used to support squad autonomy
  • our challenges and learnings with this so far

Holy crap how did I manage to cover all that in 10 minutes?! Guess I talked fast 🙂

Some sample slides below.

RIP OKR

Stack ranked bets

DIBB

Cascading Bet Boards

Squad autonomy

31 responses on “Spotify Rhythm – how we get aligned (slides from my talk at Agile Sverige)

    1. I have the same question, it will be very useful to have a record if it exists.
      Thank you very much for sharing your slides.

  1. Very interesting talk. I like the idea of the DIBB framework. The north star goals are important and should continuously be kept in mind.

  2. Hi Henrik, thanks for the slides and the video. I (we) made an English transcript of your Swedish talk from from ‘Agile Sverige’ – are you OK for me to publish the English text?

    Cheers

      1. I’d be interested in a copy of this transcript if you’re okay with publishing is, Henrik!

        Thanks!

  3. Thank you so much for the slides, Henrik. We’d like to implement the framework at our company. I saw Geoff Webb’s comment about having created an English transcript of your talk. I’d love to read the transcript whenever it is published. Regardless, thank you again for sharing the framework!

  4. Hi Henrik,

    the link to the slides seems not being available. Could you send them over to may email please?
    focc@gft.com

    Much appreciated.
    Regards.
    Fede.

  5. HI Henrik,
    it seems that the links included in this post (to the slides, and others) are no longer working.
    I guess this is the result of a reorganization of your dropbox!!
    The core of the presentation is included in the images from the post, but you may want to fix the links.

    1. Yeah, they reintroduced OKRs later, while also keeping the Rhythm. Not sure of the exact reason, but I’m guessing the two models were considered complimentary.

  6. Good to know about the framework. I hope it will give better results. Definitely, we will implement it for one of our products to test it.

  7. Thanks for the content.

    “Not sure of the exact reason, but I’m guessing the two models were considered complimentary.”

    OKRs & Bets are incommensurable. OKRs are strategic objectives (the effect we’re trying to aim for). Bets are outputs we’re hoping to create those effects (hit the OKR).

    I found it very odd that they were positioned as alternatives.

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