Spotify Engineering Culture (Spotify Model)— an introduction

Scaling Scrum, part 4

This is part four of the series:

The many approaches to scale Scrum — an introduction

I choose to discuss the Spotify Engineering Culture in this series because it is an alternative to the scaling models. I know several companies that work within this model where the teams use Scrum.

The Spotify Engineering Culture/Spotify model is indeed a bit of an oddity between LeSS, Nexus, SAFe and Scrum@Scale as it follows a different approach. Firstly: it is not necessarily making use of Scrum. The teams within Spotify are allowed to choose the best approach for them. This can and can’t be Scrum. Secondly: The Spotify engineering culture focuses on autonomy instead of alignment. Spotify encourages a tight coupling of organisational design and architecture. This way Spotify severely limits the need for alignment by focusing on making teams independent.

Don’t copy/paste culture, be inspired instead

The ‘Spotify Engineering Culture’ is a mixture of what Spotify was and what they wanted to be. The videos are from 2014. Spotify has evolved. The videos are inspirational for many. There are issues with a blind copy/paste of ‘Spotify’. I wrote about…