Mar 7, 2017 Thaisa Fernandes

Spotify Squad framework

I watched this video about the Spotify Engineering culture last year and
BOOM, my mind just exploded. Don’t forget to also read the part II here. I
felt completely in love with Spotify and its culture. The video explains the
Spotify Product Development, the release methodology and the frameworks
they use. They’re a 100% Agile company that started with the Scrum
framework, but as their teams were growing, they noticed some things on
the Scrum framework that wasn’t working well for them. So, they decided
to break some Scrum roles, artifacts and events. According to the video,
these things were getting in the way, so they decided to make the Scrum
roles, artifacts and events optional.

“Rules are a good start, then break them”

They figured out that Agile matters more than Scrum, and principles matter
more than any specific practices. Spotify renamed the Scrum Master to
Agile Coach because they wanted “servant leaders” more than “process
masters”. They also renamed Scrum team to Squads.
What’s Squad?

It’s a small cross-functional self-organized team with usually less than 8

people. They have end-to-end responsibilities and they work together
towards their long-term mission. On Squads the key drive is autonomy.

Each Squad has autonomy to decide what to build, how to build it, and how
to work together while building it. Although they need to be aligned to the
Squad mission, product strategy, and short term goals.

“Be autonomous, but don’t sub-optimize!”.

Why autonomy?

Autonomy provides employees with a sense of collective ownership. They

are part of a greater whole, active members (rather than passive) of the
team, “making a positive overall contribution to the organization” — Gri n
and Moorhead, 2008.

Trust > control

People work with autonomy, mastery, and purpose. Autonomy is

motivating, and motivated people build better stu , and also faster.
Autonomy makes us faster by leading decisions happening locally instead of
Squad roles

Leader’s job: Communicate what problem needs to be solved. And,

why.
Squad’s job: Collaborate with each squad to find the best solution.

“Loosely coupled, tightly aligned squads”

Why alignment?

Alignment enables autonomy. It’s important that everybody understands

the company/startup culture. The stronger alignment we have, the more
autonomy we can a ord to grant. Autonomy with alignment increases
motivation, quality and also fast releases.
 Font: Spotify Engineering Culture — part 1

Spotify process

Spotify has little standardization, it doesn’t have a formal standard, they

believe that cross-pollination is better than standardization. For example,
when enough Squads use a specific tool, that tool becomes a path of less
resistance and others Squads tend to choose the same tool. After other
Squads use the same tool, test it and collaborate together, then the tool
became a default standard.

Consistency x Flexibility

They have an internal open-source model where their culture is more

sharing than owning. Based on mutual respect and little ego, Spotify has a
peer code review, where anyone can add any code anytime. Then a peer can
review the code and also make adjustments where everybody collaborates
together and spread the knowledge! They also have a culture of focus on
motivation who helped them to build a very good reputation as a workplace.

How the Squad works

As long Spotify has a lot of di erent Squad’s, they needed to create some
structure to it. Each Squad is grouped into Tribe that has a Chapter. During
this process, you can switch your Squad without changing your manager.
They also have a Guild which is a community of interest by mailing list or
another informal type of communication methods inside Spotify.
 Font: Spotify Engineering Culture — part 1

Tribe: Little weight matrix. It’s a primary dimension focused on

product delivery and quality.
Chapter: Competency areas such as quality assistance, Agile coaching
or web development.
Guild: A Lightweight community of interest where people across the
whole company gather and share knowledge of a specific area. Anyone
can join or leave a Guild anytime.

“Most organizational charts are an illusion”

Most organizational charts are an illusion. Spotify main focus is community

over the structure, rather than hierarchical structures. They found that
strong enough community can get away without volume structure. If you
need to know exactly who is making decisions, you’re in the wrong place.

“If you need to know exactly who is making decisions, you’re in

the wrong place”
 Font: Spotify Engineering Culture — part 1

How easy can they get their stu into production?

The main goal is to have a small and frequent release and invest in
automation and continuous releases infrastructure. If releasing is hard the
release seldom will be di cult. Although if releasing is easy, they can
release often.
 Font: Spotify Engineering Culture — part 1

Instead of creating rules and process to manage their releasing process,

Spotify simplified it to encouraging small and frequent releases to become
routine. They changed the architecture to enable decoupled releases using
encoded embedded framework. Each section of the web browser is like a
frame of a website where each Squad can release their own stu directly.
They have three di erent Squads based on the self-service model.

Feature Squad: Focused on one feature area.

Client App Squad: Focused on making the release easy in one specific
area platform.
Infrastructure Squad: Focused on making other Squads more e ective
providing tools and routines for Squads.
 Font: Spotify Engineering Culture — part 1

Release trains — feature + toggles

Each client app has a release train that departs on their regular schedule
typically every week or every three weeks depending on the client. The
trains depart frequently and reliability doesn’t need much upfront
planning.

The interesting part of it is that Spotify releases hidden features. For

example, in the next train came a feature that isn’t 100% done, they release
it and then hide this feature. Why do they do it? The answer is simple!
Releasing unfinished features and hidden them expose integration
problems early and minimizes the need for code branching. Brilliant!

Principles > Practices

Interesting ideas:

Almost all wall at Spotify is a white board.

Each Squad has their own space with a lounge and meeting room.
Releases hidden features.

No fear, no politics! Keep experimenting Spotify!

Viewed using Just Read