How Agile Coaches Help Us Win
The Agile Coach Role @ Spotify

Kristian Lindwall
Agile coach team lead
@klindwall

Brendan Marsh
Agile coach
@brendanmarsh
Inspiration for this talk
What is Spotify?

How do we
scale Agile?

What is an 

Agile Coach?

3
8

The right music for every moment
11

24M active users.
6M paying subscribers.
20M songs.
12

55 countries
Growing fast
30

3 years ago
Growing fast
Tribes
10

100

Provide fast and
reliable access to all
the world's music

250

30

Chapter

Chapter

Chapter

Enable high product
development speed
while maintaining a
highly available service

Chapter

P

P

P

P

Squad Squad Squad Squad

P

P

P

P

Squad Squad Squad Squad

Now
How do we scale?

15
Squad

•
Self-organizing
•
• Cross-functional
5-7 engineers, less than 10
•
“Feel like a mini-startup”

C
P
Example squads
Pics of squad rooms
Provide fast and
reliable access to all
the world's music

Tribes
Chapter

Chapter

Chapter

Enable high product
development speed
while maintaining a
highly available service

Chapter

P

P

P

P

Squad Squad Squad Squad

P

P

P

P

Squad Squad Squad Squad
Squad (Servant) Leadership
“POTLAC”

Agile Coach

Chapter Lead(s)
Product Owner

How are we supporting
our team?
Scope of the Agile Coach
Individuals

Squads
Agile Coaches

Tribes
24

The agile coach
Our primary goal:
High performing
teams and a high
performing
organization
!
Motivated people...

building valuable,
quality products...

...fast!
How do we help them
reach high performance?
March 7, 2014
28

By going
above and beyond
the call of an
Agile Practitioner
Sprints
Scrum

XP

Planning Poker

User stories

We definitely do the basics...
Stand ups

Demos

Story Points

Kanban

Retrospectives
March 7, 2014
Agile - Lean
Practitioner

Lyssa Adkins - The Agile Coaching Competency Framework
Teaching
Mentoring

Lyssa Adkins - The Agile Coaching Competency Framework

Agile - Lean
Practitioner

Coaching
Facilitating
Teaching

Agile - Lean
Practitioner

Mentoring
Technical
Mastery
Lyssa Adkins - The Agile Coaching Competency Framework

Coaching
Facilitating

Business
Mastery

Transformational
Mastery
33

Some recent examples
of this in practice
1 on 1 coaching
- Team members
- Product owners
- Chapter leads
- Senior management

Coaching
Agile - Lean
Practitioner

Team offsite
- Full day(s) offsite
- Team building
- Problem Solving

Teaching
Facilitating
Agile - Lean
Practitioner

PO book club
- Series of lunch and learns
- Challenges POs
- What is the impact of planned work?

Teaching
Facilitating

Business
Mastery
TDD/XP workshop
- 2 day workshop
- Facilitated by coach and CL
- Focus on engineering skills

Agile - Lean
Practitioner
Teaching
Facilitating
Technical
Mastery
Agile - Lean
Practitioner

Squad
roadmapping
- Group of coaches came up
with new visualization
- Ran workshops with all squads in a tribe

Facilitating

Business
Mastery
Agile - Lean
Practitioner

Bootcamp
- 2 week induction
- Tech Introduction - “From Click to Play”
- Agile Introduction

Teaching
Mentoring

Coaching
Facilitating
Agile - Lean
Practitioner

Continuous Delivery
Unconference
- Lightning Talks
- Open Space

- Initiatives
!

Teaching

Technical
Mastery

Coaching
Facilitating
41

Putting it all
together
How do we know how
we’re doing?
44

Most recent model
An Example...

45
Section name

How do WE grow?
•Conferences / Meetups
•Training / Workshop
•Thought Leader Talks
•Mentoring
•Pairing
•Agile Practices Sharing
•Lean coffee
•Unconference

46
Section name

Recap
First level text
• Second level
– Third level
– Fourth level

Recap

47
Kristian Lindwall
Agile coach team lead
lindwall@spotify.com
@klindwall

Brendan Marsh
Agile coach
brendanm@spotify.com
@brendanmarsh
brendanmarsh.com
Copyright stuff
Napster pic by bixentro, cc 2.0
http://www.flickr.com/photos/bixentro/

!
Airplane pic by wildhaber
http://www.flickr.com/photos/wildhaber/5976264120/Kuster & Wildhaber Photography

!
Busy record store pic by gomattolson
http://www.flickr.com/photos/gomattolson

!
Empty record store pic by passetti
http://www.flickr.com/photos/passetti/

March 7, 2014

How agile coaches help us win the agile coach role @ Spotify