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Spotify Learns to Organize for Speed

In order to get ideas moving rapidly through an organization, Spotify believes that iteration with purpose is key.

“You can get a lot of speed by doing a lot of stuff at once,” Frödin said, which is why they have worked to create a rather unique but fractal organizational structure.

: Spotify’s Organization Matrix, compliments of HoneyPot

To put it into perspective, LinkedIn has about 2,500 people currently working at Spotify. A lot has been written about Spotify’s organization already, so here’s a brief summary:

Squads — smallest cross-functional team, that share a mandate over a clear business mission. A squad is usually between 7-15 peers, often with a product owner, a designer, an agile coach, engineers, and maybe a data analyst. At the time of this talk, Spotify has about 150 different squads.
Tribes — Take the squads that have similar missions and group about 15 of them into a Tribe. Each Tribe has one tech lead, one product lead and one design lead.
Alliance — This is the higher bucketing of tribes that own an even bigger mission like Creative or the Consumer Alliance.
Chapters — While Frödin didn’t touch on this aspect, but this is more a mastery and professional growth grouping of people in different Tribes with similar skills, where they can address common challenges.

Now, Spotify had these Squads and this unique organization before, but all of these Squads were shipping to the user focus team. In 2014, they switched that all Squads were directly interacting with users.

With each of the aforementioned steps, Spotify’s Squads and other organizational structure focuses on these questions, in order to link strategy and experiments (and also failures) to a measurable company-wide strategy:

Plan:

Who owns the user experience?
Who owns the quality of that experience?
Who owns holistic quality metrics?

Action:

Are teams set up with the proper skills to own this?
If not, how will they get there?

Outcome:

Will this lead to a better product for the user in the end?
How do you know that?

They have answered these questions by creating company rituals of strategic intent, focused on “closing that gap is propagating that intent,” with constant feedback and measuring.

Spotify’s Rituals of Strategic Intent

Spotify, like most companies, likes motivational acronyms that keep people focused on shared objectives. These two rituals work together to help regularly review objectives and pivot priorities so they don’t necessarily have fewer failures but that they fail faster.

DIBBs: Data Insights Beliefs Bets

Frödin calls this ritual “How we argue about strategy to understand how we believe.”

Data — Here is where they have shorter iterations with constant learning, applying a lot of agile and lean methodologies. This is how they have found many great ideas that haven’t worked in practice, and this is where they hold true to the statement that bugs are more expensive to fix the later they are found.
Insight — They can learn faster when they inform the consumer throughout what they are doing.
Belief — In the fact that the speed of the iteration is more important than its quality.
Bet — On Spotify’s organizational architecture and process is optimized for learning and execution speed.

To learn more about Spotify’s DIBBs, read this blog post by Henrik Kniberg.

TAPS: Now, Next and Later

For Action, how do you go from weeks of planning to something that is actually being tested by a team or many teams? With TAPS, Spotify works with a sort of reverse Kanban, with the Bets organized in this order from left to right: Now, Next, and then things that can be dealt with Later. The Now list is then organized from highest priority to lowest and is then shared with the entire company. TAPS is reprioritized every six weeks, in a special meeting to check in on the Bets.

“TAPS create peer accountability, natural pressure to ship and transparency by default.” Frödin explained this is because in everything Spotify does making sure that they put those who are going to work with it and use it are closer to the process.

“We believe communication is a little bit of an anti-pattern. The cost of communicating goes up as the distance increases. The good work assignment is to get the need for communication to go down.”

This is why, while many companies with software at the core are allowing for distributed or remote teams, Spotify makes sure that its Squads are collocated. Frödin said this is because when they share a codependent mission, it’s important for them that everything that’s necessary to get work done is right there with them, including all teammates.

To add to that, in their focus on faster is always better, they also hold true to another value: “Over-reacting beats under-reacting,” which simply echoes the importance of both speed and communication.

Where Does Spotify Find Itself Now?

Or better yet, what happened after the app platform stumble? And did their change to “speeding through failure” actually work? Frödin told us they built a Web API, which enabled them to “build a lot of interesting stuff for our users and internally,” as the API enables them to have a lot of flexibility for rapid change.

And then PlayStation Music came about, which only took four months to go from idea to Minimal Viable Product in the hands of gaming users.

“The Strategic Intent was Ubiquity — to have people use Spotify everywhere and the [music app] platform was just a tactic to get there,” he said. Now the app platform has faded away but the API enables Spotify’s ubiquity, including through the important partnership with PlayStation.

Finally, Spotify has learned that it’s much more important to hire adaptable people with the ability to learn than the specialized teammates they had targeted before.

Now we will see how this fast-learning culture will continue when they likely go public later this year.

Feature Image via Pixabay.

Source: InApps.net

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Phu Nguyen

As a Senior Tech Enthusiast, I bring a decade of experience to the realm of tech writing, blending deep industry knowledge with a passion for storytelling. With expertise in software development to emerging tech trends like AI and IoT—my articles not only inform but also inspire. My journey in tech writing has been marked by a commitment to accuracy, clarity, and engaging storytelling, making me a trusted voice in the tech community.