Spotify Engineering Culture

● Over 10 years experience
● Over 5 years as Scrum Master
● Certified Agile Coaching ICAgile
● Certified Professional Scrum
Master Scrum.org
● Certified Agile Team Facilitation
ICAgile
Maisara Khedr

What is it?
● Oct 2012, “Scaling Agile @ Spotify with Tribes, Squads, Chapters & Guilds” By
Henrik Kniberg & Anders Ivarsson.
● Mar 2014, Spotify Engineering Culture videos.

It’s not a model
● Never intended to be a model
● Snapshot of how they work
● Disclaimer: We didn’t invent this model. Spotify is (like any good agile company)
evolving fast. This article is only a snapshot of our current way of working - a
journey in progress, not a journey completed. By the time you read this, things
have already changed.
● It’s a case study

Case Study for What?
Scaling & Maintaining Culture
in
Agile Organizations

Why Spotify?
Size (2011): 311
Size (2015): 1581

Culture
● Culture is the stuff that people do without noticing it.
● Healthy culture heals broken process
● Culture eats strategy for breakfast
● Our company culture is instrumental to our success and must be mirrored in
everything we do.

Why they built this?
1. Velocity
2. Happiness
3. Scale
4. Adaptability
● Minimize decision making
bottlenecks
● Reduce Synchronization
bottlenecks
● Reduce process to a minimum
● Address short term challenges

1. Velocity
2. Happiness
3. Scale
4. Adaptability
● Increase sense of ownership
● Individual stability while fostering
dynamic organization
● Encourage personal and
professional growth

1. Velocity
2. Happiness
3. Scale
4. Adaptability
● Support organizational growth
while maintaining culture

1. Velocity
2. Happiness
3. Scale
4. Adaptability
● The model itself should be able to
grow and change

Case Study Aspects
1. Organization Structure
2. Career Development
3. Performance Management
4. Learning & Development

Squad
● Autonomous
● Feel like mini-startup
● Long lived
● Self-Organized
● Cross Functional
● Co-located
● No squad leader

Squad
Product Owner
● responsible for prioritizing what
to be done by the team
● not involved with how they do
their work.
● Collaborate with other POs

Squad
Agile Coach
● A squad has access to an agile
coach
● helps them evolve and improve
their way of working
● run retrospectives, sprint planning
meetings, do 1-on-1 coaching, etc.

Tribes
● “incubator” for the squad mini-
startups
● 40:100 people
● Co-located

Tribes
Tribe Lead
● First level of full time manager
● Responsible for providing the
best possible habitat for the
squads within that tribe.

Chapter
● Community of Practice
● Local to the tribe
● Meets regularly to discuss their
area of expertise and their
specific challenges

Chapter
Chapter Lead
● part of a squad and is involved in
the day-to-day work.
● Line manager for his chapter
members
○ Developing people
○ Setting salaries

Guild
● Community of Interest
● group of people that want to share
knowledge, tools, and practices
● Usually cuts across the whole
organization

Guild
Guild Coordinator
● Each guild has a “guild
coordinator” who, well, does
just that

Spotify: Organization Structure

Isn’t this just a matrix organisation?
● Yes. Well, sort of.
● In many matrix organizations people with similar skills are “pooled” together into
functional departments, and “assigned” to projects, and “report to” a functional
manager.
● People are grouped into stable co-located squads,
● The horizontal dimension is for sharing knowledge, tools, and code. The job of
the chapter lead is to facilitate and support this.

To make a high performing team, they build it around motivated
people, the main 3 intrinsic motivators are
1. Autonomy
2. Purpose
3. Mastery
Member Managers/Leaders
Agile Coach
Product Owner
Chapter Lead

POCLAC
Squads have their own leadership group, and that is comprised of the Product Owner,
Chapter Leader, Agile Coach. The acronym we use for this group is the POCLAC. The
leadership style is not a “top-down” approach, offering directives to the group, but
rather, it’s assessment based. They assess staffing and performance in relation to the
tasks to be accomplished.

Example:
● 600 in tech
● 70 teams
● 9 tribes

Releasing
● Release Small
● Release Often
● CD: Every commit is a release candidate, Releasing is a business decision not
technical decision

Scaling: Organization Structure

Why?
● People striving to increase their impact often wanted to become a Chapter Lead
or Product Owner even if they might have preferred the role of an individual
contributor engineer.
● Everyone in Spotify Tech should have a way to grow their careers and expand the
impact of their -work no matter what role they play. A shift into a Chapter Lead
or PO position is not necessary.

Spotify: Career Steps | Framework
● The five characteristics of Spotify employees
○ Values team success over individual success
○ Continuously improves themselves and their team
○ Holds themselves and others accountable
○ Thinks about the business impact of their work
○ Demonstrates mastery of their discipline
● Mastery was only one of the five characteristics.

Spotify: Career Steps | Framework
● Four Steps
○ Individual
○ Squad / Chapter
○ Tribe / Guild
○ Technology / Company
● Defining each of the characteristics for each step.

Spotify: Career Steps | Expectations

The behaviors in the bubbles are mostly examples, They
should be treated as triggers for discussion rather than a
checklist.

Spotify: Career Steps | When?
When you are consistently demonstrating the behaviors and
sustained impact of someone at a wider Step, your manager
should recommend you for an official promotion (as long as you
are willing to accept the increased expectations going forward).

Spotify: Career Steps | Who decide?
A chapter lead can promote one of their individual step
employees to squad/chapter step without outside approval,
though the chapter lead will make this decision in part based on
feedback from that employee’s peers in the squad and chapter.

Promotions from squad/chapter step to tribe/guild step must be
approved by the relevant tribe lead, after consultation with tribe-
level leadership.

Promotions to technology/company step must be approved by
the CTO, after consultation with technical leadership, including
people currently at the technology/company step.

promotion to the next step, at all levels, should involve
consultation with a varied group of the person’s peers using the
evaluation tools in addition to direct conversation

Spotify: Career Steps | Announcing
Formal promotion to a new Step will normally come with an
immediate compensation increase, as well as an immediately
increased scope of responsibilities. The promotion represents a
commitment from both sides: you will keep executing at the
more advanced level, and your manager will continue to provide
opportunities to have broader impact.

Spotify: Career Steps | Announcing
Public recognition will frequently be decoupled from formal
promotion. We believe it’s more effective to recognize people for
successful completion of important projects than for reaching a
(somewhat rare) career milestone.

Spotify: Career Steps | Titles
● Externally
○ They can use their roles, they can use more standard titles that they feel are
more communicable.
○ We expect employees and their managers to work together to come up with
appropriate external title usage.

Spotify: Career Steps | FAQ
What is the connection between Roles and Steps? Do I have to
be at a specific Step to take on certain Roles?
Not for most roles – but some. Examples: You won’t be a good chapter lead if your
sphere of influence is Individual, hence being squad/chapter step or above is needed.
To be a Chief Architect your sphere of influence needs to be on a company level.

Is this a reporting hierarchy?
Reporting is based on your Role and Discipline, and not your Step. Based on their role,
a Software engineer of any step can still report to a Chapter Lead.

Assigning Steps?
Each individual should use the Steps document to make a self-assessment of which
step they should be on, then have a discussion with their manager about where they
agreed and disagreed.
It can be hard to tell what step a new employee is on based solely on their interviews.
To give the employee time to acclimate to Spotify and their role, their official step will
not be determined until their six-month review. During that review, the step is set
through a discussion between the new employee and their manager.

Squad Health Check model
When checking the health of a squad there’s really two stakeholders:
● The squad itself.
○ builds up self-awareness about what’s working and what’s not.
● People supporting the squad.
○ Managers and coaches that work outside (or partly outside) the squad get a high level summary of
what’s working and what’s not.
○ They can also see patterns across multiple squads.

Spotify do basically three things:
1. Run workshops where members of a squad discuss and assess their current
situation based on a number of different perspectives (quality, fun, value, etc).
2. Create a graphical summary of the result
3. Use the data to help the squads improve

Squad Health Check model - Workshop

Real-life example of health check
output for one tribe:
It shows how 7 different squads
in a tribe see their own situation.
● Color is current state
○ green = good
○ yellow = some problems
○ red = really bad
● Arrow is the trend (generally
improving or getting worse).

Performance & Development
● Spotify believes in Performance AND Development since you can’t really
separate the two.
● Since Spotify believe in a growth mindset, They believe that Performance Reviews
are dead! Because performance ratings can trigger a fixed mindset.
● In 2013, Spotify decided to ditch employee OKRs. Individual OKRs slowed us
down without adding value
● We make sure everyone knows exactly where we are going and what the current
priorities are, and then we let the teams take responsibility for how to get there.

Performance & Development Fundamentals
● The employees own their own development.
● Power to the employees! Employees must own and drive their own performance
and development, and managers must do everything they can to support it.
● HR must act as support, an enabler, and strategic partner. Never a reactive control
function.
● No systems with heavy admin or rigid processes
● We learn from the past, but we focus on the future

Performance & Development
The four pillars of Spotify performance and development approach.
● Periodical development talks
● Continuous planning & 1:1 meetings
● Talent snapshot
● Compensation review

Development talks
● 2 per year
● a more in-depth talk focusing on growth and mastery.
● The purpose of these development talks is to match the company’s needs with our
people’s long-term ambitions.
● Every employee owns and drives their own development talks, they initiate the
meetings and gather feedback from peers.

Development talks
● In the talks, we do look at the past a little, but the main focus is on the future and
the potential.
● We use three success criteria when we talk about performance and development:
mastery, achievement, and behavior. Performance, to us, is not only about
reaching the goal. It’s also about how you got there, growing in your profession,
and being a role model.

1:1s
● There is no mandatory schedule or standard agenda, it’s all based on the
employee and manager agreeing on a setup and frequency of meetings. To
support and inspire them
● Spotify have a checklist of topics that should typically be covered.
● Example: “Half an hour, Weekly”.

1:1s
Sample goals of regular 1:1s
● Build trusting relationships between manager and engineers
● A safe place to discuss sensitive and private issues or provide personal feedback
● Discuss and work on career development plans
● Team reflections and engineer happiness
● Discuss product vision and direction

Talent Snapshot
Talent Snapshot is a way of looking at where the team is now, but not holding them
there. It helps managers see where their team members are on their performance
development journey and provide a “snapshot” of the team’s current strengths,
weaknesses, and performance.
Goals of Talent Snapshot workshop:
● To leave the session as better leaders with more confidence.
● To set concrete actions on how to further grow your team.
● To gain a better understanding and alignment of the team’s strengths and gaps.

What are their values?
● People > *
● Culture > Process
● Agile > Scrum
● Failure recovery > Failure avoidance
● Community > Structure
● Innovation > predictability
● Trust > Control
● Cross Pollination > Standardization
● Value delivery > plan fulfillment
● Enable > Serve
● Impact > Velocity
● Chaos > Bureaucracy

Inspect & Adapt
Large Scale Retrospectives

Spotify Engineering Culture

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