Summary of the short animation on the engineering culture and Spotify. How Spotify adapted towards Agile working from scrum set up. At the end of the summary are the links to the videos and blogs that explain the story in detail.

1. Sonat YALCINKAYA
1-Sep-2015
Spotify engineering culture
Summary of the short animation describing the engineering culture at Spotify

2. Agile > Scrum
Agile is preferred over scrum because, there was a need for servant leaders
Scrum master becomes the agile coach
Scrum team becomes the squad team which
is team of 6-8 people with E2E responsibility
for long term has squad mission and product strategy
for short term has goals

3. Alignment and autonomy don’t conflict
The ideal state is to have both high alignment and high autonomy
Micro
Management
Servant leader
Lack of
discipline
Autonomy
Alignment
lo hi
hi

4. Cross-pollination > Standardization
There is no one single standard across the squad teams. Internal open-source
model enables cross-pollination

5. Community > Structure
Tribes are matrix organizations consist of squads for feature orientation and
chapters for competency areas.
Different squad members working for different chapters enable fluid working
structure.
Guilds are the lightweight informal communities. Based on common interest made
of squads and chapters

6. Routine > Drama
Routine release structure enables smaller chunks of continuous delivery. This is
preferred over one mega release to create momentum.
Releasing is easier and often

7. Fail recovery > Fail avoidance
The motto is “Fail fast -> learn fast -> iterate fast”
Limited blast radius create room for failure via
Decoupled architecture
Gradual rollout

8. Lean way of working
Waste management is vital part of company culture. The key is to expose waste via
creating full transparency with the tools below
Visual progress
Weekly demo
Daily sync
Improvement boards
Definition of awesome

9. Other key Spotify choices
Enable > serve
Trust > control
Impact > velocity
Innovation > predictability
Value delivery > plan fulfillment
Chaos > bureaucracy
Sonat YALCINKAYA
1-Sep-2015

10. Sources
Video – part 1
Video – part 2
Blogpost of the videos
Alignment vs autonomy
Squad types
Chaos vs. Bureaucracy