How I learned Scrum and the “Spotify Model” don’t match

Autonomy vs Product focus

In 2017, our company adopted the Spotify Model. Or rather, we created our own model “heavily inspired by” Henrik Kniberg’s Spotify engineering culture videos.

We were so heavily inspired that we only differed from “Spotify” on details. The most important detail was that every team would work with Scrum. Scrum was well known by most developers. Our environment was complex. We considered it to be wise to all start the journey with Scrum.

We defined the following traits to be vital for our success:

• Teams should be autonomous. This meant that the teams should have all the skills to be able to create an Increment every Sprint. On top of this, they should be solely responsible for a small and decoupled piece of the product. They should not require any help from outside of the team.
• Teams should take ownership. This was tightly aligned with autonomy. Every team was responsible for a small piece of the total product. Every piece had a Product Owner. The Product Owner was accountable for the value of their piece, their piece of the product. As a result, every team had its own Product Owner.
• Teams should directly align with their stakeholders. Communication would cease to be non-existent or via proxies. Stakeholders would be involved in the discussions, mainly at the Sprint Reviews and refinement sessions.
• The model should be easily…