5.7: Case Study: Agile at Spotify - Video Tutorials & Practice Problems

<v ->Now let's review a case study</v> from team organization and company organization perspective. Let's look at Agile at Spotify. This is an excellent example of a flexible, agile organizational structure. It was made well-known by its Agile coach, Henrik Kniberg. As you probably know, Spotify is a company that provides music subscription on demand. It was growing rapidly and to sustain its growth and give autonomy to the teams at the same time, Spotify created a multi-dimensional model of a Scrum organization. There are four types of groups here, tribes, squads, chapters and guilds. The major unit is a squad. A squad is similar to a Scrum team. It's a cross-functional dedicated team. Spotify compared it with a mini startup. Collection of squads is called a tribe. It usually includes up to a hundred people. An example of tribe is a music player at Spotify. The tribe is seen as an incubator for mini startups. Chapters and guilds are the glue that holds the company together. A chapter is a group of people having similar skills and working within the same general competency area within the same tribe. They regularly meet to discuss their area of expertise and build sustainable practices and processes. Usually members of a chapter report to their line manager who has traditional responsibilities such as developing people, deciding on compensation and promotions as well as hands-on responsibilities of a team member very frequently. Think about development function, QA function and so forth. Guilds are more organic communities of interest where people want to learn and share knowledge, their tools and practices. Chapters are always local to a tribe where guilds can go across the whole organization. So examples may include the Acceptance Test Driven Enthusiasts Group, Agile Coach Guild, Database Guild. They also meet for conferences and share events and basically they just want to build up the experience. So this highly flexible structure supported Spotify's rapid growth. As we know in the first two years they have grown from 30 to 300 people in tech and the company continues rapid growth ever since. This structure represents agile, very flexible organization. It allows for autonomy, mastery and purpose of the team members.