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When collaboration fails: Lessons from Spotify’s model
In 2012, Spotify introduced a unique approach to organising teams to enhance productivity and gain a competitive advantage. The model was designed to enable Spotify to adapt to industry changes quickly and to maintain a competitive advantage by creating a culture of collaboration and innovation across its engineering teams.
In this model, the teams were organised into structures known as squads, tribes, chapters, and guilds. These structures enabled different types of interactions among the teams:
- Squads were cross-functional product teams, highly autonomous, able to move fast and adapt to feedback.
- Chapters and guilds cut across squads, bringing people together by shared expertise or interests, allowing knowledge to flow and ideas to cross-pollinate.
At its heart, the model aimed to balance autonomy with alignment, and horizontal cross-pollination with vertical depth of knowledge and specialisation.
For a while, the Spotify Model became the darling of the tech world. Companies rushed to imitate it, hoping to unlock success. But over time, its limitations surfaced. Even Spotify eventually moved away from the model.