(2022-02-07) Yip The Top 3 Points You Should Have Paid Attention To In The Spotify Engineering Culture Videos

Jason Yip: The top 3 points you should have paid attention to in the Spotify Engineering Culture videos that aren’t Squads, Chapters, Tribes, Guilds. When it comes to product development culture, structure is the last thing you should be worried about, not the first.

I bet that there are other points in the two videos (part 1, part 2) that are way more important for most organisations. The top three that come to mind are:
Aligned autonomy;
Creating trust-at-scale (across boundaries);
Decoupling (to enable autonomy)

Aligned autonomy

Alignment and autonomy are not two ends on a scale but two dimensions on a 2x2 matrix.

• cf Agility, Context, and Team Agency

NOTE: The concept of Aligned Autonomy comes from The Art of Action, which applies “mission command” to the business context. (Stephen Bungay, ASIN:B004CRSN2O)

There are two parts to aligned autonomy:

Clearly expressed product strategy (strategic context)

good product strategies have a structure that follows what Richard Rumelt calls the kernel:
A diagnosis based on data and insights;
A guiding policy, that is, a set of beliefs that describe the general approach to overcome the identified problems;
A key set of coherent actions (or more accurately, bets).

Empowered Product Teams (aka Squads)

Creating trust-at-scale (across boundaries)

Trust-at-scale requires acknowledging the humanity of politics and fear

No to pretending politics and fear don’t happen; yes to encouraging dialogue and safety in response to politics and fear

Decoupling (to enable autonomy)

Architecture should be coupled where product capabilities should be coupled and decoupled where product capabilities should be decoupled. Architecture should follow product strategy.

Specifically technical services should not couple capabilities at different product lifecycle stages (innovation, differentiation, commodity)

Spotify Models are for the obedience of fools and the guidance of the wise

The videos suggests that this comes from no politics and no fear. I don’t agree with this.

*There are two key contributors to trust-at-scale:
A strong culture of cross-pollination;
A strong culture of mutual respect (aka People > ). This is associated with the shared belief that we’re all in it together and need to help each other to succeed.