Spotify Culture Big Ideas
@andrefaria

#1 Rules are a good
start but them break them when needed Agile matters more than Scrum Agile principles are more important than practices.

#2 Teams should have an
end-to-end Responsibility for what they build. Autonomous Squad Less than 8 people Self organization team

#3 Teams should have a
clear Long Term Mission aligned with the whole company - Make Spotify the best place to discover music - Infrastructure for a/b testing. Be autonomous but don't sub- optimize.

#4 Leaders should focus on
what problems to solve and let the teams discover the how and solve it

#5 Avoid Waiting Waste Each
team is responsible for one system. But anyone can alter any code, so if team A needs something in a system managed by team B, they can ask them, but if team B have other priorities, team A do not need to wait, they can go ahead and to it.

#6 Release should be routine
not drama Small frequent releases. If it hurts do it often. Release trains and feature toggles.

#7 Fast fail recovery instead
of fail avoidance Fail fast -> Learn Fast -> Improve Fast Post mortems after a failure.

We care more about innovation
than predictability. Ideia - Narrative - MVP (tweaks based on data) Backlog, developing, released, impact achieved #8 100 % predictability = 0% innovation

Spotify Hack Week (Hackathon) Do
whatever you want, with whoever, in whatever way. Experiment friendly culture. A or B? Don't know let's try both. #9 Make cool things real

We ask what's the hypothesis,
what did we learn and what will we try next. That enables us to make data driven decisions instead of opinion-driven, ego-driven or authority driven decisions. #10 Make Data Drive Decisions

Stop doing things that do
not add value. Run Keep/Drop Retrospectives. What's the minimum viable bureaucracy to avoid Chaos? #11 Have a waste-repellent culture

- No recurring bugs. -
Really finishing stuff. - etc… Use an Improvement Board with Before and After Scenarios and actions to make progress #12 Build a Definition of Awesome!

#13 You are the culture
so model the behavior you want to see

Reference
http://labs.spotify.com

Thanks! @andrefaria
http://blog.andrefaria.com/en