Organizational Design for Creative-Inventive Markets: Spotify Culture

Integrating theme: Forming and Leading Teams
Key words: Culture, servant leaders, diffusion, knowledge integration psychological safety

Spotify has quickly emerged as a leader in engineering culture. Most notably, their approach to team structure is used as the paradigm for agile development teams.

In a recent presentation in Technology Based Operations, the Director of Quality Assurance at Procore demonstrated the influence the Spotify model has had on their team structure. Much like Spotify, the product teams at Procore are designed for flexibility, creativity, and innovation.

Product teams are organized into tribes, these tribes may represent a platform area — such as “the mobile tribe”. These tribes function as a mini start up accelerator.

Within the mobile tribe, there may be individual squads, such as android, ios, or ipad. Squads consist of a product manager, developers, and designers.

Chapters are functionally organized across squads, and are led by a servant leader style mentor with high experience. Finally, guilds are flexible, informal groupings of subject area experts — such as leadership, or usability.