Scaling Agile in your Organization with the Spotify Model
summary
Company scales from 5 to 42 developers (projected 80) by adopting a Spotify-inspired structure of tribes, 5–8 person squads, chapters and guilds and standardizing on Scrum with cross-team scrum-of-scrums. Product is rebuilt with React Redux Node.js; Visual Studio Team Services; feature toggles and trunk-based CI/CD and automated tests. Result: modular architecture plus a cross-cutting concerns team lets teams ship safely and reduces claim handling from 25 days to 2–3 days (sometimes 3 hours).
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chapters (33)
- 0:00Start
- 0:09Scaling Agile in your Organization with the Spotify Model
- 6:40Growing a software team rapidly can cause growing pains
- 9:50Agile practices were getting in the way, so Spotify made them optional
- 10:24Also uses abstractions like tribes, chapters and guilds
- 10:40Teams free to pick their own process and technologies
- 11:57Squads are self organizing and empowered to make their own decisions
- 12:16Squad decides What and How to build a product but it has to fit in with the overall vision and Why statements
- 12:46Squads have a vision and mission statement that aligns with the overall product vision
- 12:58Overall product vision and high level requirements override any squad
- 14:15Squad members meet regularly to share ideas
- 14:45Management more liberal than authoritative, but authoritative when needed
- 16:11Squads can define their own process
- 18:30Encourage innovation with hackathons
- 20:33Invest in test automation and continuous delivery automation
- 22:04To succeed in this way of working, it requires support from the top of the organization
- 22:21Adopt the spirit of the model, not the whole model
- 23:18Our goal was to be able scale the teams safely as we take more investment without causing chaos
- 28:13All teams work under a set of mission statements, principles and values
- 32:00Our squads are autonomous in that they manage their own work
- 32:41Each team has daily standups
- 32:55Every other day nominated members from each squad have a standup
- 33:10Scrum of Scrums aids alignment between teams
- 35:17Our corporate customers are still very much in a waterfall mindset
- 36:50We try to keep the teams as Agile as we can, where appropriate
- 38:38Balance Autonomy and Accountability
- 39:12Organizational Architecture vs Enterprise Architecture
- 42:54This model is great when you need to rapidly expand your teams
- 43:22The Spotify model is not one size fits all
- 43:37It is not as prescriptive as Scrum Nexus or the Scaled Agile Framework
- 43:52Adoption requires buying from the top of the organization
- 44:08Cultural fit is as important, if not more important, than skills when hiring
- 44:24Small focused squads create autonomy and greater sense of ownership
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