My friend Josh Anderson has been studying and following Spotify’s approaches to agile team and organizational structure, both in general and in his leadership role at Dude Solutions. I’ve been interested in what they’re doing as well, but I don’t have the “playground” that Josh has.
I thought I’d consolidate some links to Spotify’s journey here.
To be honest, I’m not as enamored with Spotify as Josh is. It’s not that they aren’t doing really cool things. It’s that quite a few of my peers in the agile community are chasing Spotify’s version of agile scaling and operational dynamics as, dare I say it, a Shiny Object.
Not Josh, but many, many others.
So it’s with some hesitancy that I pulled all of these links together. I think Spotify has an interesting approach for their context. Will it necessarily work in yours? Probably not. But the ideas are new, fresh, and…very interesting.
But use them with context-based thinking and caution…
Links
Article by Henrik Kniberg and Anders Ivarsson (October 2012) - http://ucvox.files.wordpress.com/2012/11/113617905-scaling-agile-spotify-11.pdf
And an associated slide deck - http://www.slideshare.net/vmysla/scrum-at-spotify
Video from Joakim Sunden and Anders Ivarsson at LeanKanban North America conference in February 2014 - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SUR9q_Qcrk4
Kevin Goldsmith shares his thoughts on the usability of the Spotify structures in general –
Leadership at Spotify - http://vimeo.com/111131934
Spotify Engineering Culture
· Part 1 - http://vimeo.com/85490944
· Part 2 - http://vimeo.com/94950270
Joakim Sunden shares an entire “daily series” on the role and life of the Agile Coach at Spotify - http://joakimsunden.com/2013/04/the-agile-coach-role-at-spotify/
Henrik Kniberg interview on HighFive.com - http://blog.highfive.com/how-spotify-built-one-of-the-best-engineering-cultures
Metrics - https://medium.com/@joentakanen/agile-metrics-by-spotify-4c8653f6984
Stay agile my friends,
Bob.