Learn From The Spoti 385645 NDX

Learn From the Spotify Model for Better Enterprise Agile
Scaling
Published 27 January 2020 - ID G00385645 - 32 min read
By Analysts Peter Hyde
Initiatives: Application Development and Platforms for Technical Professionals
Agile adoption at entertainment company Spotify provides a powerful and compelling model
for digital business transformation. However, application technical professionals scaling agile
should avoid imitating Spotify’s approach and instead learn from it to revolutionize their own
development process.
Overview
Key Findings
■ The Spotify Model is a popular aspirational pattern for scaling agile to the enterprise. It is not,
however, a structured framework that can be applied to any business.
■ The foundation of the Spotify Model is an open and collaborative culture that values
transparency, empowerment and trust.
■ Spotify is a digital-native organization built on strong agile and lean principles to innovate and
evolve within a challenging market. Organizations will struggle to adopt the Spotify Model if
they do not share its cultural values.
Recommendations
Modernize application development strategies for digital business by learning from the Spotify
Model and adopting appropriate practices to:
■ Deploy products early and often with a regular delivery cycle, phased rollouts and a limited
“blast radius.”
■ Create a dedicated team space optimized for communication and collaboration to increase
productivity, motivation and learning.
■ Implement hackathons, health checks and improvement themes to drive innovation and
continuous improvement.
Analysis
Gartner, Inc. | 385645

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This research note is restricted to the personal use of shinta_indriyaty@bri.co.id.
Swedish entertainment company Spotify has implemented an agile development model that is
highly regarded by agile practitioners and widely copied by other organizations.
This assessment provides an evaluation of the Spotify Model and

practical advice on how application technical professionals adopting and
scaling agile can learn from it to improve the success of their teams.
Although never intended as an enterprise agile framework, the Spotify Model has become a
popular pattern for agile adoption and scaling. There is no single Spotify Model definition, just a
group of papers and videos that show the practice at specific points in time. The development
process at Spotify is continually evolving through experimentation, with new practices piloted and
proven techniques shared. By understanding the Spotify Model and embracing the values behind it,
the entire organization can maximize the effectiveness of its agile transformation. Additionally,
application technical professionals who adopt and adapt proven practices from the Spotify Model
improve their personal effectiveness and that of their teams.
To be clear, the Spotify Model is an example of agile scaling performed by a young entertainment
company. It is not a defined framework to be implemented, a process to be followed or even a
method to be copied. It is instead the result of Spotify’s journey in creating a vibrant business using
modern development practices. With its strong communication principles and powerful cultural
framework, the Spotify Model epitomizes agile organizational design. Spotify aligns teams with
values and missions, organizes products using lightweight structures, and empowers teams to
make decisions. The high level of autonomy across individual teams is illustrated by the amount
of variation in tools and practices between squads.
Background
Spotify grew quickly after its launch in 2008. However, by early 2011, it was experiencing growing
pains due to the rapid expansion of its engineering team, which jumped from 10 to 100 people in
support of six million active users. To solve this challenge, Spotify CTO Oskar Stål started to
experiment with a scaling model based on agile and lean principles.
“We need to innovate, experiment and learn faster than the competition.” 1
— Daniel Ek (Spotify co-founder and CEO)

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By the end of 2011, Spotify had successfully launched in the U.S., grown to 32.8 million users and
evolved an innovative company culture. Today, Spotify is a global enterprise with upward of 248
million users 2 (see Figure 1) supported by more than 1,800 engineering personnel split across
more than 150 teams.
Figure 1. Spotify Subscriber Growth
The Spotify Model has been publicized through many presentations and blog posts, starting with
“Scaling Agile @ Spotify,” 3 a paper written in October 2012 by agile coaches Henrik Kniberg and
Anders Ivarsson. Henrik went on to produce three popular videos 4 highlighting the agile
transformation at Spotify.
This Gartner research cuts through the evangelism of the Spotify Model and focuses instead on
what works and can be adopted by other organizations.
Spotify Structure
Successful agile adoption requires alignment on a collaboratively created shared vision to provide
focus for change. To maintain alignment, Spotify holds town hall meetings every two weeks,
featuring a CEO briefing and upper management Q&A. A set of shared values helps to form the
desired culture. For example, Spotify’s values at the start of its agile transformation in 2011 were:
■ Trust and transparency
■ Experiment and evaluate

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■ Focus on motivation
■ Enable people
■ Teams on all levels; empowered and autonomous
As shown in Figure 2, the values at Spotify have evolved since 2011 to reflect the changing culture
of the organization — from a startup to an international media services provider. This evolution
demonstrates the constant need to refine your goals as your business develops.
Figure 2. 2019 Mission Statement and Core Values at Spotify
The organizational elements of the Spotify Model are easily recognized and frequently adopted by
other companies, such as travel website Skyscanner, gambling company Sky Betting & Gaming,
and financial institution ING at its Netherlands headquarters. Application professionals must
understand how teams are structured, how they collaborate and how dependencies are managed
to maximize learning and knowledge sharing. The positive IT team practices at Spotify are better
understood with this compositional knowledge.
Other non-IT groups at Spotify include people operations (POPS) and company operations (COPS).
These groups improve alignment by helping people understand how their work fits in with the
company mission, vision and goals. An operations team is also present to help squads set up
infrastructure and delivery pipelines. The primary dimension of the matrix organization at Spotify
will always be the delivery of valuable outcomes with minimum viable bureaucracy.

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“Heisenberg Squads: It is better to solve the problems created by fluidity
rather than imposing more structure.”
— Kevin Goldsmith (former VP of engineering at Spotify)
Squad
A squad is a full-stack team with all of the skills and expertise required to design, develop, test and
deliver products. Each squad has a mission, focusing on either short-term initiatives, such as
“create a common API test framework,” or permanent capabilities, such as “make Spotify the best
place to discover music.” A mission provides each squad with a common aligned purpose and
promotes collaboration to achieve a common goal. When a mission is completed or invalidated,
such as through experiments, then the team disbands.
Squads act as ministartups and are empowered through the product owner (PO) to self-organize to
fulfill their missions with collective responsibility and minimal dependency on other teams. Each
squad owns its process, quality and tooling and works to be fully autonomous with end-to-end
responsibility for achieving client-focused objectives. Squads own their development processes;
Scrum, Kanban, Scrumban and even handcrafted methods are all in use. There is also a surprising
lack of consistency in technical practices across teams. Some use test-driven development, while
others use behavior-driven development. Many do not even use anything recognizable as agile or
lean development at all.
Each squad has a dedicated product owner responsible for understanding the target customer,
prioritizing work, maximizing the value created and producing the best possible customer outcome.
Although the product owner provides the vision, the development team members decide how to
implement it (as they would in Scrum). The ideal size for a squad is between six and 12 people. For
example, a squad could include a product owner, a user experience designer, an Apple iOS
developer, an Android developer, a user interface developer, a quality assurance engineer, a back-
end developer and an agile coach (see Figure 3).
Figure 3. Spotify Squad

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Squads often use lean startup principles to develop solutions with a four-stage hypothesis-driven
development cycle: think it, build it, ship it, tweak it. Higher-level decisions for the squad are made
by the product owner, chapter lead and agile coach (POCLAC) leadership team, which represents
the product, team and process. As the basic unit of development, the purpose of the squad is to
maximize business agility through rapid decision making, continual improvement, parallel
development and accelerated delivery of customer value.
“We aim to make mistakes faster than anyone else.”
— Daniel Ek (Spotify co-founder and CEO)
Dependencies between individual squads are managed using on-demand synchronization through
Scrum of Scrums events. Participants from dependent squads meet to resolve issues, typically
with each representative answering the following four questions:
1. What has your team done since we last met?

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2. What will your team do before we meet again?
3. Is anything slowing your team down or in its way?
4. Are you about to put anything in another team’s way?
Team-Level Recommendations
Work with your team to incorporate the principles of Spotify’s squads:
■ Co-create a team charter to form a common agreement on how the team gets work done.
■ Develop a full-stack agile team that is capable of performing the full life cycle of activities from
concept to cash. This effort will include training, coaching and mentoring to develop and share
new skills.
■ Take ownership of your process, quality and tooling, and seek continuous improvement in all
three.
■ Collaborate frequently with your product owner and business sponsors to understand the
product from the end user’s viewpoint. Specialism remains valuable, but it must be supported by
wider knowledge. Team members need to build on this business knowledge to become valuable
versatilists.
Tribe
A tribe is a collection of squads working in a related business area. For example, Spotify’s Partners
Tribe is responsible for vehicle and television integrations, and for the connect feature that plays
music on over 300 products using the Spotify app as a remote control. The ideal tribe size is 40 to
150 people and is limited by the maximum number of stable social relationships theorized by
Dunbar’s number. 5 Squads are organized into tribes to cover all product domains. In 2015, Spotify
had 75 squads in 12 colocated tribes.
A tribe lead (TL) is empowered to create the right environment for squads to succeed. The tribe
acts as an incubator for the ministartups it contains. Tribes are physically located in the same
office, with shared lounges to promote intersquad collaboration. The tribe members meet regularly
in informal team events to showcase current work, discuss what has been delivered and learn from
each other. These events are typically held as “unconferences” — participant-driven meetings
based on variations of the Open Space Technology 6 approach.
The tribe trio of technology, product and design (TPD) makes leadership decisions at the tribe level.
As shown in Figure 4, this triumvirate consists of the tribe lead, product area lead (PAL) and design
lead (DL). The tribe leadership meets every two weeks to discuss progress and then posts the
results of the meeting on the portfolio wall (the Tribe’s lean Kanban board) for everyone to see.
Figure 4. Spotify Tribe

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Product-Level Recommendations
Spotify’s tribes are analogous to product areas in other organizations (or a program in SAFe). If
your organization is focused on short-term projects, then speak with your architects and project
management office about transitioning to primarily a product model. Begin with a single product,
and demonstrate the efficiency and improvements before scaling to your organization’s full
product range.
If you have successfully adopted a product model, then understanding the way tribes enable and
support teams is beneficial. Promote frequent communication between teams through:
■ Scheduled events to discuss progress and challenges
■ Opportune networking via community spaces
■ Informal interactions such as group lunches or postwork sports activities
Alliances
When two or more tribes need to work together on closely aligned missions, they form a support
structure called an alliance. The alliance trio, consisting of an alliance lead (AL), PAL and DL,

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provides leadership at an alliance level (see Figure 5). Examples of alliances within Spotify’s
business mission space are the Consumer Alliance and the Revenue Alliance. An example within
Spotify’s support mission space is the Product Platform Alliance. Daily synchronization meetings
within the alliance coordinate work and identify dependencies, which are posted on a shared board
for resolution by individual squads.
Figure 5. Spotify Alliance
Alliances enable larger developments, but scaling beyond a few squads over two or more tribes is
still challenging at Spotify. Autonomy at the squad level makes it difficult to implement standards
and a common technical architecture — this lack of standardization hampers alliances. The
system owner role is a recent addition to scaling at Spotify, and has responsibility for the overall
architecture and technical integrity of a product.
The system owner role is held by either a single person or, for operationally critical systems, a pair
of people representing development and operations. The role focuses on technical debt, quality,
scalability, stability and the release process. System ownership takes an average of 10% of a
squad member’s time, but varies between systems. The system owner works with the chief
architect, who coordinates architectural standards across all systems and reviews development

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work to align it with the architectural vision. Note that the chief architect provides suggestions and
advice to squads, but does not dictate design decisions.
Portfolio-Level Recommendations
There is no simple solution to large-scale product development. Spotify’s alliances improve

coordination but do not solve the issue. Review your needs against Spotify’s scaling and that
defined by the Scaled Agile Framework (SAFe), Large-Scale Scrum (LeSS), Disciplined Agile (DA),
Nexus and Scrum@Scale. Implement regular synchronization events to align the work of teams,
and make dependencies visible so that they can be solved directly by the teams involved.
Architecture must also be developed as part of your product, in line with your enterprise
architectural roadmap, to ensure a high-quality, maintainable solution.
Chapter
A chapter is a cross-squad line management grouping for people working within the same general
competency area within a single tribe. Chapters meet regularly to discuss their area of expertise.
They are responsible for personal and professional growth and developing required capabilities.
Chapters become “homes,” with chapter leads remaining fixed and stable points for their direct
reports. Examples of chapters at Spotify include the Mobile Chapter, Test Chapter, Backend
Chapter and Agile Coach Chapter.
The chapter lead is the line manager for members. In addition to staffing, appraising,
compensating and managing the performance of the chapter, the chapter lead is responsible for
developing the chapter members. A chapter lead typically holds line management responsibility for
five to seven people. At the same time, this individual is a member of a squad and works within the
same competency area (see Figure 6). Active, real-world competency-focused work improves the
technical management capability of chapter leads. Weekly one-on-one meetings enable chapter
leads to support and challenge their direct reports to learn new skills, grow professionally and
achieve mastery.
Figure 6. Spotify Chapters

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As an example, let’s look at Spotify’s Music Player Tribe. This tribe is responsible for search,
collection, playlists, importing, storing, streaming, advertisements, discovery and radio. It contains
three back-end chapters, two front-end chapters, a core library chapter and a test chapter. Each of
these seven chapters has a chapter lead to provide line management to its members.
Technical career progression at Spotify is through the Steps Framework. 7 This framework enables
Spotifiers to explore new areas, increase their individual impact, and understand the behaviors and
expectations for each personal growth step. The internal Loops tool supports the Steps Framework
through peer feedback to identify individual strengths and improvement areas.
Professional Development Recommendations
Develop your own career roadmap, and discuss it with your line manager. Set a clear goal, and
identify the steps toward reaching it. Work with your team and leadership to develop the skills and
knowledge to become more valuable to your business. Career architecture is as important to your
professional development as application architecture is to your product development.
“Don’t aspire to be the best on the team. Aspire to be the best for the
team ”
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team.
— Brian Tracy
And if you are a line manager, follow the personal and professional development path shown by
Spotify’s chapters. In addition to weekly one-on-one meetings, hold regular group events to discuss
your domain, learn new skills and develop capability in growth areas.
Guild
A guild is a lightweight community of interest providing transversal knowledge management
across tribes (see Figure 7). Guilds are created whenever strong interest exists in a subject area
and enough people are motivated to form a community. Guilds provide a means for people
throughout the organization to develop skills and competence by sharing experience, tools and
practices. Spotify’s leadership supports guilds by providing the necessary funding and by ensuring
that members have the time required to take part. Participation is voluntary, and examples include
a Web Development Guild, Java Guild, Android Guild, Test Automation Guild and Agile Practices
Guild. There are also guilds that are not focused directly on developing technical capabilities.
These include a Photography Guild, Cycling Guild and Microbrewery Guild.
Figure 7. Spotify Guilds

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A guild coordinator within each guild provides active community leadership to ensure members
maximize the value of their interaction. Guilds use collaboration tools and hold regular events to
develop expertise and to increase the capability of the organization within their domains. People
are free to join one or more guilds and can participate to a level commensurate with their interest in
the topic covered.
Knowledge Management Recommendations
Start communities of practice (practitioner-led versions of guilds) for knowledge management

within your organization. The three factors of domain, practice and community combine to create
a powerful and transversal method for capturing information, sharing understanding and growing
capability. Spotify’s guilds provide a great example of voluntary groups collaborating to increase
the skill and knowledge of their members. Use collaboration tools, such as Slack or Microsoft
Teams, and hold regular events to increase networking among members. Also, consider how non-
work-related communities of interest could provide opportunities for interaction away from
business areas and create a sense of fun within your organization.
Spotify Practices
Squads at Spotify are autonomous and self-organizing. This means that there are few standard
practices followed widely. The push for empowerment and minimum viable bureaucracy has
created a culture laboratory where practices are tried and discarded when found wanting. As an
example, developers from Spotify attended SAFe training to explore what could prove useful to
them. Release trains for client applications, similar to SAFe’s Agile Release Trains (ARTs), are
already extensively used within Spotify. Successful practices are frequently taken up by other
squads as propagated by chapters and guilds. Agile coaches support people in creating high-
performance teams with a delivery focus.
Squad Rooms
Each colocated squad has a dedicated space — an area optimized for collaboration and teamwork.
The area is specifically designed to facilitate interaction within a squad and increase both
productivity and innovation (see Figure 8).
“I’ve got a theory: If you love your workplace, you’ll love your work a little
more.”
— Cynthia Rowley

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Note that a squad will physically move to be alongside another team when the two are sharing
dependencies over a few sprints within a common mission. This dynamic colocation is another
example of strong collaboration at the development team level.
Figure 8. Team Area
Team offices vary widely but frequently include common features:
■ Desk area: Each squad room has 12 desks with long flat tables to promote pairing and flexibility.
Laptop docking stations are linked to twin screens to maximize productivity.
■ Huddle room: Each squad has a dedicated meeting room with videoconferencing to avoid
potential booking delays. This separate space provides team members with privacy when
required.
■ Team lounge: An informal collaboration area provides a second space away from the formal
work area for presentations, design breakouts and relaxed discussions.
■ Whiteboards: Most walls are whiteboards to facilitate co-creation, innovation and the sharing of
ideas. They are also useful for agile modeling, Kanban boards and big visible charts.

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■ Screens: Large wall-mounted monitors decorate the team lounge for easier information sharing,
the desk area for agile dashboards and the huddle room for videoconferencing.
■ Open separators: Glass panels, transparent artwork and low bookcases give separation without
blocking light or closing off areas. It is important to maintain openness and transparency both
culturally and physically — daylight is a bonus too.
■ Community space: The area between teams is purposefully designed to promote collaboration
and chance meetings. The shared space is welcoming, comfortable and easily reconfigurable to
meet the needs of its users.
Team Environment Recommendations
Work with your organization’s leadership to promote the benefits of sitting together in a shared
space. Create a separate team lounge to discuss work away from your desks, and use this new
area to increase collaboration with agile modeling and retrospectives. Requisition whiteboards and
monitors to improve openness, increase communication and create a shared knowledge space.
If your team is distributed, then consider how to increase the opportunity for valuable
communication and collaboration. Collaboration tools such as Slack and Microsoft Teams are a
great start. Also consider the following:
■ Perch for an always-on video
■ Google Hangouts for team meetings
■ Retrium and TeamRetro for retrospectives
■ Confluence for knowledge management
■ Spacetime for seeing the time of day for each team member
Improvement Theme
The “improvement theme” is a tool for moving stepwise from your current situation to your target
condition. As the team works toward the goal, it resolves uncertainties and learns more about the
challenges involved. Moving in directed and meaningful steps increases the team’s ability to
uncover obstacles and helps the team collaborate to creatively solve those issues.
“When in doubt, do something.”
— Harry Chapin

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The improvement theme tool was developed by Crisp consultant Jimmy Janlén while working at
Spotify. It is based on the “improvement kata” described in Mike Rother’s book “Toyota Kata:
Managing People for Improvement, Adaptiveness, and Superior Results.” 8 The poster in Figure 9 is
a living charter prominently displayed in the team area to act as a driver for change.
Figure 9. Improvement Theme Charter
The improvement theme charter features five sections:
1. Title: State the name of the improvement theme at the top of the board to provide a focus for
activities. Create a title that is an unambiguous call to action that aligns the team.
2. Now/problem: Describe the current state related to the improvement theme selected.
Collaborate to create this honest and open assessment.
3. Definition of awesome: Define the goal or target state for the improvement theme. Workshop as
a team to agree on the vision and to maximize buy-in. Imagining this perfect state puts people
in a positive frame and helps them focus on great outcomes.
4. Next target condition: What will have changed X weeks from now? Specify the duration and
identifiable situation for this next increment toward the goal.

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5. First steps: Determine three actions that must be taken to move the team toward the next target
condition. Write these onto individual Post-it Notes, and ensure that the actions are specific,
measurable, actionable, relevant and time-bound (SMART).
The improvement theme is an example of a tool developed and supported by the agile coaches at
Spotify to empower teams in resolving their challenges. Another example is the Spotify Retro Kit, 9
which is a self-service pack containing all of the information to run retrospectives, including
guidance sheets, work papers, Post-it Notes and Sharpie markers.
Kaizen Recommendations
Create an improvement theme board for your team. Hold a workshop, or sprint retrospective, to
identify the most pressing issue and to agree on the goal for the team. Collaborate to determine the
elements for the next target condition in working toward that goal. As a team, establish the next
three actionable steps toward that target condition. Put all of this information up on a board within
the team area to make it open and visible and to keep it prominent in people’s thoughts. Review the
board during following sprint retrospectives to track progress.
Health Checks
The squad health check model is a visual and systemic approach that enables teams to self-
improve (see Figure 10). It replaces traditional maturity models with a self-assessment that is both
useful for teams and visible to stakeholders looking for patterns across multiple squads. Note that
Figure 10 is just one example of a health check model at Spotify. Other variants, such as the
fluent@agile game, are used across the organization.
Figure 10. Health Check Board

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Squads update the health check model quarterly at a workshop facilitated by an agile coach. The
team discusses each health check indicator in turn, and then dot-votes to reach consensus on the
overall color to assign to each — red, amber or green (RAG). The team uses this information to
prioritize improvement areas over the next few sprints.
Team Health Recommendations
Volunteer to facilitate a retrospective on team health. Begin the event by collaborating to identify
the top 10 fitness indicators for team well-being. Independently dot-vote against these team health
indicators before opening up a discussion on what the results mean. As a team, agree on a single
status for each health indicator — either green (happy face), amber (neutral face) or red (sad face).
The discussion will result in issues and actions for the team to address. Repeat the check using the
same indicators one month later to determine what improvements have been made.
“If everything seems under control, you’re just not going fast enough!”
— Mario Andretti

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It is vital to present the health check as a means of self-improvement for squads and not use it for
judgment or in comparison with other teams. Do not tie the health check model to incentives or
employee metrics, because this approach reduces acceptance, leads to gaming behaviors and
renders the entire exercise pointless. Generate a cross-team health RAG dashboard to look for
patterns, systemic issues and overall trends — work with teams to resolve these.
Delivery Focus
Spotify decouples architecture so that each squad can independently deliver small experiments
and learn fast. The gradual rollout of features enables effective monitoring and adaptation by
teams. Through decoupled architecture, failures have a limited “blast radius” and impact only a
small area of the system for a few users. And because each squad has end-to-end responsibility
for its part of the system, it can resolve issues fast.
“Real artists ship!”
— Steve Jobs
Spotify seeks to outdeliver competitors through a culture promoting innovation and

experimentation. As shown in Figure 11, hypothesis-driven development (HDD) is implemented by
adapting lean startup’s “build-measure-learn” cycle to produce a four-stage, data-driven iterative
product development process:
■ Think it: Define the hypothesis to be tested and the metrics that will validate it. Produce
prototypes in this innovation phase to test assumptions internally for viability before committing
to development.
■ Build it: Use short iterations to develop a minimum viable product (MVP) that fulfills the
narrative and is ready for end users. Release features as soon as possible to gain real customer
feedback.
■ Ship it: Release the MVP to a small percentage (1% to 5%) of end users in order to perform A/B
testing and collect early feedback. Analyze the data through rapid measure, learn and adapt
cycles until the exceptional viable product (EVP) can be rolled out to all users. Address practical
operational issues and scaling during this stage to build out the feature.
■ Tweak it: Products remain in a continuous iterative phase where customer feedback is
monitored, experiments are run, and A/B testing is performed to continually improve results.
Figure 11. Validated Learning

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Delivery Pipeline Recommendations
Implement agile within your team with Scrum or Kanban, backed up by Extreme Programming (XP)
practices. Use continuous integration, automated testing and continuous delivery to create a
development pipeline with a regular and reliable release process. Break work down into small
features that can be independently deployed. Deliver early, deliver often, and constantly evaluate
the effectiveness of your changes with well-defined outcome metrics.
Hackathons
Google’s “20% time” policy provided employees with the freedom to devote time to creative and
innovative activities not directly related to their work. Other organizations have emulated this
concept with “hack time,” but have found that this time is often displaced by delivery pressures. In
2013, Spotify moved to holding an inclusive, organized “hack week” twice a year to both promote
innovation and enable new ideas to be explored, developed and presented in a short amount of
time. Spotify developed the event by learning from Netflix and Yahoo hack days, Atlassian ShipIt
Days, and Management 3.0 Exploration Days.
“If the rate of change on the outside exceeds the rate of change on the
inside, the end is near.”
— Jack Welch
The hack week goal is to explore new ideas and collaborate on areas that people feel passionate
about but are too busy to pursue alongside their normal work. The mantra for the hack week is
“make cool things real,” and teams from across the organization collaborate on the activity. All
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participating teams get to show off their work at the end of the week during a “hack fair” at each
site.
Providing a fun environment for people to experiment, innovate and learn in without the
interruptions and pressures of normal work helps to engage employees and produces great results.
The often-cited example is Google’s 20% time, which led to Gmail, Google Earth, Google Talk (now
Hangouts), Google Maps and Google AdSense. The practice of giving employees paid time to
engage in activities not related directly to their normal work improves recruitment and retention.
Hackathons provide another method to promote innovation, improve cross-department
collaboration and increase learning in your role.
“It’s a way to experiment with ideas in a low-cost way. Lots don’t make it
into products, but every hackathon tends to result in four or five things
implemented on the site. A couple have changed the direction of the
company.” 10
— Pedram Kenyani (Facebook)
Hack Time Recommendations
Put together a realistic and compelling plan for a two-day hackathon within your domain. Pitch the
idea to your functional management by stressing how it can increase innovation and allow the
exploration of new ideas. Add appropriate constraints such as “all teams must demonstrate their
work publicly at the end of the event in a ‘science fair’ event.” Create a sense of excitement with
advertising, prizes and supportive ambassadors. Ensure that you take photographs, learn from the
event and publicize it afterward.
Strengths
The Spotify Model provides a great example of agile development done well at a modern
organization. It is constantly evolving and internally inconsistent, but useful to learn from. The key
strengths to understand from the agile transformation at Spotify are:
■ Aligned autonomy: Squads agree on objectives and goals to align their work with the strategy of
the organization. Increased autonomy is possible because of the clear squad mission produced
by this alignment. This leads to the catchy internal motto “be autonomous, but don’t
suboptimize — be a good citizen in the Spotify ecosystem.”
■ Collaborative workspace: Dedicated squad workplaces are designed to maximize

communication and collaboration. The enhanced development environment includes pairing

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stations, a breakout area, a meeting room, whiteboards and wall-mounted monitors.
■ Accelerated product delivery: Products are delivered early and often using release trains, feature
toggles, phased rollouts and decoupled deployments.
■ Innovation culture: Development is based on experiments, with validated learning that promotes
evidence-based improvement. Hack weeks provide a structure for wider collaboration and free
experimentation.
■ Knowledge management: Professional development through chapters, along with active sharing
of proven practices through guilds, augments knowledge management.
■ Continual improvement: Squads utilize improvement themes, health checks and regular
retrospectives to improve their effectiveness. Guilds provide wider knowledge sharing and
improve capability. Culture is evolved through conversation, collaboration and creativity.
Weaknesses
Spotify is an exemplar of a modern technology company but is not without its challenges. The
strong empowerment of squads creates issues that require more structure, which conflicts with the
“hierarchy is history” minimum viable bureaucracy mindset. The main weaknesses of the Spotify
Model are:
■ It is not a framework: Spotify has developed its current model — over the past nine years of
experimentation — as a specific solution suitable for its domain, challenges and people. It is not
a defined framework for scaling agile to the enterprise at your organization.
■ Large projects are still difficult: Scaling above three teams for a single project remains
challenging for Spotify, due to the strong autonomy of individual squads. Tribes, alliances and
leadership trios all help to alleviate this issue, but it is in no way solved yet.
■ Entropy hampers standards: Each squad is empowered to make its own decisions, not only on
features to be developed, but also on the development process, tools and even code quality. The
lack of common standards makes it difficult to create a homogeneous environment that
facilitates onboarding, cross-team working and collaboration.
■ Growing senior leaders is hard: The servant leadership required for highly consensus-driven
teams is difficult to develop from within the organization. It is difficult to recruit at senior levels,
due to the need to find a match to Spotify’s culture of autonomy and empowerment.
■ Local optimization is suboptimization: Independent squads self-organize to produce end-to-end

value, and they focus on improvements within their sphere of control while ignoring the overall
value stream. The Spotify Model requires a clear link between the squad mission and the
organizational strategy to create aligned autonomy and a focus on improved customer

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outcomes. Local optimization occurs when teams focus on their own area without considering
the higher-level consequences.
Guidance
The Spotify Model showcases the evolution of agile development at a contemporary entertainment
company. The journey Spotify is taking is unique, and it is constantly experimenting to deliver the
highest value to subscribers and, now, shareholders, since listing on the New York Stock Exchange
(NYSE) in April 2018. Internally, the technical practices are varied and inconsistent between
squads, with an apparent lack of discipline or any coherence to a single model. Review the
practices highlighted in this research, and follow the guidance detailed below:
1. Upgrade yourself: Don’t expect your organization to evolve to meet your needs. Change starts
within. Analyze your skills gaps, the role you fulfill within your team and the goals of your
organization. Create a personal development roadmap focused on self-improvement and
fulfilling your potential. Discuss your targets with your line manager and team to gain feedback
and support.
2. Evolve your own culture: Do not attempt to copy or even imitate the Spotify Model, because it is
not a designed framework or pattern that can be simply implemented and easily followed.
Create your own model by learning from Spotify’s journey, and pilot individual practices while
working toward a lean and agile organization. Workshop to conceive a perfect development
situation, and perform small collaborative and time-bound experiments, using the improvement
theme, to move toward that vision.
3. Create a safe-to-fail environment: Innovation happens when people are free to experiment. With
this experimentation comes possible and even frequent failure. If teams can “fail fast and fail
inexpensive,” then development accelerates, and learning becomes an intrinsic part of work.
Celebrate failure through “fail walls” and internal blogs to maximize learning across the
organization — failure without learning is just failure. Hack weeks broaden this experience to the
enterprise and create a network of collaboration and innovation.
4. Develop a lean-agile mindset: Change your organization with the practical adoption of lean and
agile practices. Collaborate as a team to solve problems, and work with business and customers
to understand the jobs to be done (JTBD). 11 Change your team’s physical environment to
promote the right company culture. Implement regular retrospectives to create iterative and
incremental improvement to the development process — evolution not revolution.
5. Start with IT, but don’t stop there: Agile and lean practices accelerate product development,
increase product quality and maximize the business value of work done. Agile at Spotify is
mainly limited to research and development, which is around 60% of the organization. Once you
have transformed IT through modern practices, it is time to transition all departments in the

Page 23/26
wider business. This starts at the technical professional level — broaden your expertise, speak to
other departments, and seek to understand the needs of the business and end customers.
In conclusion, create a culture of trust, experimentation and collaboration in your team through
openness and common practice. Be inspired by the Spotify Model, but recognize it for what it is: an
evangelized view of an organization constantly reinventing itself to stay ahead in a challenging
market. Learn from the practices that have proven, through experience, to be valuable across
multiple teams, but do not assume that you will get the same results with your different cultural
foundation. Be the change that you want to see within your organization, share your experience,
and work with like-minded people to produce a valuable and lasting transformation.
“Stop trying to borrow wisdom and think for yourself. Face your
difficulties and think and think and think and solve your problems
yourself. Suffering and difficulties provide opportunities to become
better. Success is never giving up.”
— Taiichi Ohno
Evidence
1
“How to Build Your Own ‘Spotify Model,’” LinkedIn.
2
“Number of Spotify Monthly Active Users (MAUs) Worldwide From 1st Quarter 2015 to 3rd
Quarter 2019,” Statista.
3
“Scaling Agile @ Spotify With Tribes, Squads, Chapters & Guilds,” Crisp.
4
Henrik Kniberg Videos:
■ “Agile Product Ownership in a Nutshell,” YouTube (Henrik Kniberg).
■ “Spotify Engineering Culture (Part 1),” Spotify.
■ “Spotify Engineering Culture (Part 2),” Spotify.
5
R. Dunbar. “How Many Friends Does One Person Need? Dunbar’s Number and Other Evolutionary
Quirks.” Faber & Faber. 2010.
6
H. Owen. “Open Space Technology: A User’s Guide.” Berrett-Koehler Publishers. 2008.
7
“Building a Technical Career Path at Spotify,” Spotify (by Kevin Goldsmith).
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8
M. Rother. “Toyota Kata: Managing People for Improvement, Adaptiveness and Superior Results.”
McGraw-Hill Professional. 2009.
9
“Spotify Retro Kit,” Spotify (by Martin Österberg).
10
N. Perkin and P. Abraham. “Building the Agile Business Through Digital Transformation.” Kogan
Page Publishers. 2017.
11
S. Wunker, J. Wattman and D. Farber. “Jobs to be Done: A Roadmap for Customer-Centered
Innovation.” AMACOM. 2017.
Document Revision History

Adopting the Spotify Model for Better Enterprise Agile Scaling - 6 July 2018
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© 2020 Gartner, Inc. and/or its affiliates. All rights reserved. Gartner is a registered trademark of Gartner, Inc.
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Learn From the Spotify Model for Better Enterprise Agile

By Analysts Peter Hyde

Initiatives: Application Development and Platforms for Technical Professionals

Gartner, Inc. | 385645

This assessment provides an evaluation of the Spotify Model and

— Daniel Ek (Spotify co-founder and CEO)

Gartner, Inc. | 385645

Figure 1. Spotify Subscriber Growth

■ Trust and transparency

■ Experiment and evaluate

Gartner, Inc. | 385645

■ Teams on all levels; empowered and autonomous

Figure 2. 2019 Mission Statement and Core Values at Spotify

Gartner, Inc. | 385645

— Kevin Goldsmith (former VP of engineering at Spotify)

Figure 3. Spotify Squad

Gartner, Inc. | 385645

“We aim to make mistakes faster than anyone else.”

— Daniel Ek (Spotify co-founder and CEO)

1. What has your team done since we last met?

3. Is anything slowing your team down or in its way?

4. Are you about to put anything in another team’s way?

Work with your team to incorporate the principles of Spotify’s squads:

Figure 4. Spotify Tribe

■ Scheduled events to discuss progress and challenges

■ Opportune networking via community spaces

■ Informal interactions such as group lunches or postwork sports activities

Gartner, Inc. | 385645

Figure 5. Spotify Alliance

Gartner, Inc. | 385645

There is no simple solution to large-scale product development. Spotify’s alliances improve

Figure 6. Spotify Chapters

Gartner, Inc. | 385645

Professional Development Recommendations

Figure 7. Spotify Guilds

Gartner, Inc. | 385645

Knowledge Management Recommendations

Start communities of practice (practitioner-led versions of guilds) for knowledge management

Gartner, Inc. | 385645

Figure 8. Team Area

Team ofﬁces vary widely but frequently include common features:

Gartner, Inc. | 385645

Team Environment Recommendations

■ Perch for an always-on video

■ Google Hangouts for team meetings

■ Retrium and TeamRetro for retrospectives

■ Conﬂuence for knowledge management

“When in doubt, do something.”

Gartner, Inc. | 385645

Figure 9. Improvement Theme Charter

The improvement theme charter features ﬁve sections:

Gartner, Inc. | 385645

Figure 10. Health Check Board

Gartner, Inc. | 385645

Team Health Recommendations

Gartner, Inc. | 385645

“Real artists ship!”

Spotify seeks to outdeliver competitors through a culture promoting innovation and

Figure 11. Validated Learning

Gartner, Inc. | 385645

— Pedram Kenyani (Facebook)

Hack Time Recommendations

■ Collaborative workspace: Dedicated squad workplaces are designed to maximize