How can you use the Spotify model to manage self-managed teams?

2 Why use the Spotify model?

The Spotify model has several benefits for managing self-managed teams, such as fostering a culture of autonomy, trust, and empowerment; enabling a fast and continuous delivery of value to customers; promoting a high level of alignment and collaboration across the organization; and supporting a scalable and adaptable organization. Teams can make their own decisions without being micromanaged, reducing dependencies, handovers, and bottlenecks between teams. Furthermore, it encourages teams to adopt agile practices such as Scrum, Kanban, or Lean Startup. Additionally, it creates a shared vision, mission, and goals for each tribe and squad, facilitating communication and coordination through chapters and guilds. Finally, it allows teams to form, change, or disband based on customer feedback or market changes while providing the resources and tools needed for success.

3 How to use the Spotify model?

The Spotify model is not a one-size-fits-all solution, and it may not work for every organization or context. However, if you want to use the Spotify model to manage self-managed teams in your organization, there are some steps you can take. To start, ensure that everyone has a clear purpose and vision for your organization. This will help define the scope and direction of tribes and squads, and align them with strategic objectives and customer needs. Create small, cross-functional, and autonomous squads based on the features or product areas you want to deliver. Give each squad a mission, a product owner, and a backlog of user stories or tasks. Let them decide how to work, what to work on, and how to deliver value. Group squads into tribes based on their common mission, vision, and domain. Assign each tribe a lead responsible for providing support, guidance, and coordination. Encourage each tribe to establish their own culture while staying aligned with the organization's purpose and vision. Form chapters based on skills or roles of squad members such as development, testing, design or management. Appoint chapter leads who are also squad members to lead chapters and mentor members. Hold regular chapter meetings where members can share knowledge and discuss challenges/solutions. Finally, foster guilds based on interests/passions/challenges of people regardless of their squad/tribe/chapter affiliation. Support guilds in self-organizing/self-governing with space/time to meet/learn/innovate/collaborate across the organization.

4 How to adapt the Spotify model?

The Spotify model is not a static or prescriptive framework, but rather a dynamic and evolving one, so you should not copy it blindly or rigidly, but rather adapt it to your own context and goals. To manage self-managed teams in your organization, you can experiment with different squad, tribe, chapter, and guild configurations and use metrics, feedback, and retrospectives to evaluate the effectiveness and efficiency of your teams. Additionally, you can customize the roles and responsibilities of your squad, tribe, and chapter leads, and choose the agile methods and practices that suit your teams and projects. Furthermore, you should foster a culture of learning, feedback, and improvement across your organization by using tools, platforms, and events to facilitate knowledge sharing, innovation, and collaboration among your teams.

5 What are the challenges of the Spotify model?

The Spotify model is not a silver bullet, and it has its own challenges and limitations. Establishing trust, transparency, and accountability among teams, leaders, and stakeholders can be difficult. Additionally, silos, conflicts, or inconsistencies may arise from different goals, priorities, or ways of working. Moreover, the complexity and overhead of your organization increases when managing multiple teams, roles, and structures. Furthermore, the model may not be suitable or feasible for certain types of projects, products, or customers that require a high degree of standardization, integration, or compliance.

6 Here’s what else to consider

This is a space to share examples, stories, or insights that don’t fit into any of the previous sections. What else would you like to add?