How to successfully drive initiatives, objectives or opportunities that require several squads (or teams) to succeed? How to do this in a way that respects the agile mindset without falling into the command-and-control trap? Today, this problem is more complex than it seems. We’ve designed and built our squads for self-organization and autonomy in the

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One of the strongest management trends right now in companies striving towards Agile is undoubtedly OKRs, “Objectives and Key Results”.

But how do OKRs stack up against the alternatives when it comes to alignment frameworks? And what are the potential undesirable behaviors that come with them?

That is what I intend to explore in this article.

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.

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