Spotify | An Emergent Organization
The mechanisms that enable self-management also balance freedom and control
Over the past few years, I’ve read a bit about Spotify’s rethinking of their engineering organization, but I hadn’t really looked closely. I was aware of Spotify’s squads, small (less than a dozen members), self-organizing teams focused on a single feature of Spotify’s system.
However, I came across a BBC piece by Jared Lindzon about Squads, and I read this [emphasis mine]:
As Spotify began to scale, it wanted to maintain the same culture of innovation that enabled its early success — but it’s hard to operate like a disruptive start-up when your employee count balloons into the hundreds, then thousands. That’s why, in 2012, Spotify began organising employees into groups of about six to 10 people, each with a single task or assignment. Although team members don’t necessarily have the same expertise as their squad-mates, each squad has the combined expertise necessary to tackle that challenge.
Squads operate like their own start-up within a tech giant, choosing their own leaders, timetables and working methods. The Agile framework is disrupting other huge, matrix-style organisations, upending the traditional working structures of major companies including Apple, Netflix, HP and Bank of…
