Spotify Culture Big Ideas
@andrefaria

#1 Rules are a good start
but them break them when
needed
Agile matters more than
Scrum
Agile principles are more
important than practices.

#2 Teams should have an
end-to-end Responsibility
for what they build.
Autonomous Squad
Less than 8 people
Self organization team

#3 Teams should have a clear Long
Term Mission aligned with the
whole company
- Make Spotify the best place to
discover music
- Infrastructure for a/b testing.
Be autonomous but don't sub-
optimize.

#4 Leaders should focus on
what problems to solve and
let the teams discover the
how and solve it

#5 Avoid Waiting Waste
Each team is responsible for
one system. But anyone can
alter any code, so if team A
needs something in a system
managed by team B, they
can ask them, but if team B
have other priorities, team A
do not need to wait, they can
go ahead and to it.

#6 Release should be
routine not drama
Small frequent releases.
If it hurts do it often.
Release trains and feature
toggles.

#7 Fast fail recovery instead
of fail avoidance
Fail fast -> Learn Fast ->
Improve Fast
Post mortems after a
failure.

We care more about
innovation than predictability.
Ideia - Narrative - MVP (tweaks
based on data)
Backlog, developing,
released, impact achieved
#8 100 % predictability = 0% innovation

Spotify Hack Week
(Hackathon)
Do whatever you want, with
whoever, in whatever way.
Experiment friendly culture. A
or B? Don't know let's try both.
#9 Make cool things real

We ask what's the hypothesis,
what did we learn and what
will we try next. That enables
us to make data driven
decisions instead of
opinion-driven,
ego-driven or
authority driven decisions.
#10 Make Data Drive Decisions

Stop doing things that do not
add value.
Run Keep/Drop
Retrospectives.
What's the minimum viable
bureaucracy to avoid Chaos?
#11 Have a waste-repellent culture

- No recurring bugs.
- Really finishing stuff.
- etc…
Use an Improvement Board
with Before and After
Scenarios and actions to make
progress
#12 Build a Definition of Awesome!

#13 You are the culture so model the
behavior you want to see

Reference
http://labs.spotify.com

Thanks! @andrefaria
http://blog.andrefaria.com/en