At Spotify, we believe that we will win if we can iterate on our product faster than the competition. If we can build our product faster, we can learn faster and thus improve & grow as a company faster than our competitors. We are growing rapidly to make this happen, but how do we ensure that our development teams are happy, high performing and constantly improving? How do we share these learnings with the rest of the business? One of the crucial roles in this endeavour are our Agile Coaches. In this talk, I will present what we believe an Agile Coach is, give some insight into the daily life of an Agile Coach at Spotify & explain why we believe that Agile Coaches help us win.

1. How Agile Coaches
Help Us Win
The Agile Coach Role @ Spotify
Brendan Marsh
November 27, 2013

2. Inspiration for this talk

3. What is an agile coach
at Spotify?
What do
they do?
3
Why do we believe they
help us win?

4. 4
24M active users.
6M paying subscribers.
20M songs.

5. Growing fast
30
3 years ago

6. Growing fast
Tribes
10
100
Provide fast and
reliable access to all
the world's music
250
30
Chapter
Chapter
Chapter
Enable high product
development speed
while maintaining a
highly available service
Chapter
P
P
P
P
Squad Squad Squad Squad
P
P
P
P
Squad Squad Squad Squad
Now

7. How do we scale?
7

8. Squad
•
Self-organizing
•
• Cross-functional
• 5-7 engineers, less than 10
Autonomous
•
“Feel like a mini-startup”
C
P

9. Provide fast and
reliable access to all
the world's music
Tribes
Chapter
Chapter
Chapter
Enable high product
development speed
while maintaining a
highly available service
Chapter
P
P
P
P
Squad Squad Squad Squad
P
P
P
P
Squad Squad Squad Squad

10. Squads

11. Scope of the Agile Coach
Individuals
Squads
Agile Coaches
Tribes

12. 12
The agile coach

13. Our primary goal:
High performing
teams and a high
performing
organization

14. Motivated people...
building valuable,
quality products...
...fast!

15. How do we help them
reach high performance?
November 27, 2013

16. 16
By going
above and beyond
the call of an
Agile Practitioner

17. Sprints
Scrum
XP
Planning Poker
User stories
We definitely do the basics...
Stand ups
Demos
Story Points
Kanban
Retrospectives
November 27, 2013

18. Agile - Lean
Practitioner
Lyssa Adkins - The Agile Coaching Competency Framework

19. Teaching
Mentoring
Lyssa Adkins - The Agile Coaching Competency Framework
Agile - Lean
Practitioner
Coaching
Facilitating

20. Teaching
Agile - Lean
Practitioner
Mentoring
Technical
Mastery
Lyssa Adkins - The Agile Coaching Competency Framework
Coaching
Facilitating
Business
Mastery
Transformational
Mastery

21. 21
Some recent examples
of this in practice

22. 1 on 1 coaching
- Team members
- Product owners
- Chapter leads
- Senior management
Coaching

23. Squad coaching
Agile - Lean
Practitioner
Teaching
Mentoring
Coaching
Facilitating
- During standups
- Retrospectives
- Planning meetings
- We’re part of the team
Technical
Mastery
Business
Mastery
Transformational
Mastery

24. Agile - Lean
Practitioner
Team offsite
- Full day(s) offsite
- Team building
- Problem Solving
Teaching
Facilitating

25. TDD/XP workshop
- 2 day workshop
- Facilitated by coach and CL
- Focus on engineering skills
Agile - Lean
Practitioner
Teaching
Facilitating
Technical
Mastery

26. Agile - Lean
Practitioner
PO book club
- Series of lunch and learns
- Challenges POs
- What is the impact of planned work?
Teaching
Facilitating
Business
Mastery

27. 27
Putting it all
together

29. Section name
How do WE grow?
•Conferences / Meetups
•Training / Workshop
•Thought Leader Talks
•Mentoring
•Pairing
•Agile Practices Sharing
•Lean coffee
•Unconference
29

30. Section name
Recap
First level text
• Second level
– Third level
– Fourth level
Recap
30

31. Brendan Marsh
Agile coach
brendanm@spotify.com
@brendanmarsh
brendanmarsh.com