Agile scaling approach - spotify model & common sense

1. Agile Scaling
Approach
Spotify Model
&
Common Sense

2. Agile Consultant
Anuj M Ojha
A Certified Agile practitioner and transformation consultant who helps organizations deliver value to customers and businesses,
through team coaching and mentoring, effective collaboration, facilitation and continuous improvement practices
Certifications
Experience
13+ years of experience with relevant agile experience of
11+ years and have trained 12000+ participants &
coached 125+ teams on agile practices & implementation
techniques. Have been to various geographies to deliver
consulting services.
My special area of interest has been bringing in business
agility, appropriate mindset & enriching Culture. It all
starts from no process to some process which helps teams
& companies in being their own better version by healing
their broken processes and other aspects.
Educational Experience_
• Bachelor of Engineering - Computer Science
Areas of Expertise
Business Agility, Agile Coaching (Leadership,
Business Stakeholders, Product Owners, Scrum
Masters, Development Team members, Agile in
Distributed Teams & at Scale, Agile Engineering
Practices (Pair Programming, TDD, BDD, ATDD & CI)
Organisations I have worked with_
ServiceNow, McKinsey, Verifone, Honeywell, Fidelity,
SAP Labs, Sourcebits, Dell, Dell EMC, Nets Norway,
Maersk, NEC Technologies, Tesco, Reliance JIO,
Reliance ADA, Ericsson, Orange, L&T Infotech,
Gemalto and many more.

3. Snr Leader
Leader A Leader B
Mgr B.1Mgr A.2Mgr A.1
Team B.1.1
Team A,1,1 Team A.2.1
Mgr A.3 Mgr A.4
Leader C
Team A.3.1 Team A.4.1
Mgr C.1 Mgr C.2 Mgr C.3
Leader D
Team C.1.1 Team C.2.1 Team C.3.1
Usual Org Structure (limited view)

4. Spotify Scaling Inspiration
TRIBE LEADER A
LETS LEARN ABOUT HOW TO SCALE
<LOGICAL GROUP>
Product Owner
Scrum Master/
Coach
CHAPTERS
DEV TEAM
SQUAD 1 SQUAD 2 SQUAD 3 SQUAD 4 SQUAD 5 SQUAD 6
● Tribe is a logical group
● Squads are
self-organizing, cross
functional & mission
oriented
● Chapters are SME/
COE who assures
excellence in each
squads
● Guilds are interest
groups
EX: FRONTEND TECHNOLOGIES
EX: QUALITY ASSURANCE
GUILD - Ex: MICRO SERVICES
EX: TECHNICAL EXCELLENCE (UAT, AUTOMATION)
EX: BACKEND TECHNOLOGIES
CHAPTER
LEAD
SYS OWNERS

5. Guilds & Chapters
Full autonomy’s downside is loss of economies of scale. Hence, we need a glue that keeps the company
together while gives us economies of scale without compromising autonomy.
Chapter - small family of people have similar skills & working in same competency area
Guild - it cuts across the tribes and should be treated as wide-reaching ‘community of interest”

6. Business Case 1 - Asynchronous development
SQUAD 1
SQUAD 2
SQUAD 3
MTP 1 MTP 2 MTP 3 MTP 4
MTP 1 MTP 2 MTP 3
MTP 1 MTP 2 MTP 3 MTP 4 MTP 5 MTP 6 MTP 7
Considerations:
● No big product scaled team (like 50-150 people) hence almost no intra-team integrated outcomes
● Different - clients, product-outcomes, commit dates, tracks, regional specific solutions
● We may also have geographically distributed teams

7. Business Case 2 - Synchronous Sprints | Release Trains | ‘ONE’ solution
SQUAD 1 SQUAD 2 SQUAD 3 SQUAD 4 SQUAD 5 SQUAD 6
MTP 1
P
L
A
N
MTP 2
MTP 3
MTP 4
P
L
A
N
P
L
A
N
P
L
A
N
Cycle One
Cycle Two
Cycle Three
Cycle Four

8. Business Case 3 - Synchronous Sprints | loosely coupled but tightly aligned
SQUAD
1
SQUAD
2
SQUAD
3
SQUAD
4
SQUAD
5
SQUAD
6
MTPSprint 5
Sprint 8
Sprint 10
Sprint 13
Sprint 18
Sprint 21
Sprint 24
MTP MTP
MTP MTP MTP
MTP MTP MTP
MTP MTP
MTP MTP MTP MTP
MTP
Sprint Cycles Sample

9. Scrum of Scrums- On-demand
Scrum of scrums is a synchronized meeting where one person from each team meets to
discuss dependencies. This kind of coordination meeting could be useful where a large
project requires coordinated work of multiple squads for few months. The teams
composing the Scrum of Scrums are responsible for a fully integrated set of potentially
shippable increments of product at the end of every Sprint.

10. Way to achieve desirable outcomes..
● Squads are ready and incrementally delivering outcomes (self-organizing & cross-functional teams)
● Groom the roles - PO, SM, DT, Chapter lead, Tribe leader, System Owner
● Backlog for each squad is identified using ‘timeline view‘ as much it’s feasible at the project
start (visibility)
● Incremental outcomes are planned & getting delivered to clients (client satisfaction)
● Trusted velocity of teams have been identified (productivity)
● Continuous monitoring of Release, sprint & team health (predictability & transparency)
● Agile engineering practices are in progress (TDD, Refactoring, Automation, Pair programming,
peer-reviews, continuous integration etc)
● Improved team health and knowledge (employee satisfaction)
● Process checks across teams have been executed (agility health assessment)

11. Thank you!