Learn Spotify (an Agile Framework)
- 1. S T O K E T H E E N G I N E F O R T E A M I M P R O V E M E N T
- 2. MEET THE BOARD Syed Ali Mel Marcus Jose Carranza Victor Arenas
- 3. Disney is going agile!!!!!!
- 4. Tribe Tribes, Squads, Chapters & Guilds Squad Squad Squad Chapter Chapter Squad Squad Squad Chapter ChapterGuild Tribe Dealing with multiple teams in a product development organization is always a challenge!
- 5. Squads The basic unit of development at Spotify is the Squad A Squad is similar to a Scrum team, and is designed to feel like a mini-startup. They sit together, and they have all the skills and tools needed to design, develop, test, and release to production. They are a self-organizing team and decide their own way of working – some use Scrum sprints, some use Kanban, some use a mix of these approaches Each squad has a long-term mission such as building and improving the Android client, creating the Spotify radio experience, scaling the backend systems, or providing payment solutions. The picture below illustrates how different squads take responsibility for different parts of the user experience. Squads are encouraged to apply Lean Startup principles such as MVP (minimum viable product) and validated learning. MVP means releasing early and often, and validated learning means using metrics and A/B testing to find out what really works and what doesn’t. This is summarized in the slogan “Think it, build it, ship it, tweak it”. Because each squad sticks with one mission and one part of the product for a long time, they can really become experts in that
- 6. Huddle Room Most squads have an awesome workspace including a desk area, a lounge area, and a personal "huddle" room. Almost all walls are whiteboards. To promote learning and innovation, each squad is encouraged to spend roughly 10% of their time on “hack days”. During hack days people do whatever they want, typically trying out new ideas and sharing with their buddies. Some teams do 1 hack day every second week, others save up for a whole “hack week”. Hack days are not only fun, they are also a great way to stay up-to-date with new tools and techniques and sometimes lead to important product innovations!
- 7. Organizational Support – Product Owner / Agile Coach A squad doesn’t have a formally appointed squad leader, but it does have a product owner. • The product owner is responsible for prioritizing the work to be done by the team, but is not involved with how they do their work. • The product owners of different squads collaborate with each other to maintain a high-level roadmap document that shows where Spotify as a whole is heading, • Each product owner is responsible for maintaining a matching product backlog for their squad. A squad also has access to an agile coach, who helps them evolve and improve their way of working. • The coaches run retrospectives, sprint planning meetings, do 1-on-1 coaching, etc. • Ideally each squad is fully autonomous with direct contact with their stakeholders, and no blocking dependencies to other squads. • Basically a mini-startup. With over 30 teams, that is a challenge!
- 8. Organizational Support – Product Owner / Agile Coach Run a quarterly survey with each squad. This helps focus our improvement efforts and find out what kind of organizational support is needed. Here’s a visual summary of one such survey, showing 5 squads within a tribe: The circles show the current state, arrows show the trend. For example we can see a pattern where three squads reports problems around releasing and that it does not seem to improve - this area needs urgent focus! We also see that squad 4 does not have a great situation with agile coach support, but that it is already improving. • Product owner - The squad has a dedicated product owner that prioritizes the work and takes both business value and tech aspects into consideration. • Agile coach - The squad has an agile coach that helps them identify impediments and coaches them to continuously improve their process. • Influencing work - Each squad member can influence his/her work, be an active part in planning and choose which tasks to work on. Every squad member can spend 10% of his/her time on hack days. • Easy to release - The squad can (and does!) get stuff live with minimal hassle and sync. • Process that fits the team - The squad feels ownership of their process and continuously improves it. • Mission - The squad has a mission that everyone knows and cares about, and stories on the backlog are related to the mission. • Organizational support - The squad knows where to turn to for problem solving support, for technical issues as well as “soft” issues.
- 9. Tribes A tribe is a collection of squads that work in related areas – such as the application, feature, or backend infrastructure. • The tribe can be seen as the “incubator” for the squad mini-startups. , and have a fair degree of freedom and autonomy. • Each tribe has a tribe lead who is responsible for providing the best possible habitat for the squads within that tribe. • The squads in a tribe are all physically in the same office, normally right next to each other, and the lounge areas nearby promote collaboration between the squads. Tribes are sized based on the concept most people cannot maintain a social relationship with more than 100 people. When groups get too big, we start seeing more things like restrictive rules, bureaucracy, politics, extra layers of management, and other waste. So tribes are designed to be smaller than 100 people or so.
- 10. Tribe Gatherings Tribes hold gatherings on a regular basis, an informal get-together where they show the rest of the tribe (or whoever shows up) what they are working on, what they have delivered and what others can learn from what they are currently doing. This includes live demos of working software, new tools and techniques, cool hack-day projects, etc.
- 11. Squad Dependencies With multiple squads there will always be dependencies. Dependencies are not necessarily bad - squads sometimes need to work together to build something truly awesome. Nevertheless, our goal is to have squads be as autonomous as possible, especially minimizing dependencies that are blocking or slowing a squad down. To aid in this, regularly ask all squads which other squads they depend on, and to what extent those dependencies are blocking or slowing the squad down.
- 12. Problematic Dependencies Discuss ways to eliminate the problematic dependencies, especially blocking and cross-tribe dependencies. This often leads to reprioritization, reorganization, architectural changes or technical solutions. • The survey also helps see patterns around how squads depend on each other - for example that more and more squads seems to be slowed down by operations. Use a simple graph to track how the various types of dependencies increase or decrease over time. • Scrum has a practice called “scrum of scrums”, a synchronization meeting where one person from each team meets to discuss dependencies. • Spotify does not use scrum of scrums, mainly because most of the squads are fairly independent and don’t need such a coordination meeting. Instead, scrum of scrums happens “on demand”. For example we recently had a large project that required the coordinated work of multiple squads for a few months To make this work, the teams had a daily sync meeting where they identified and resolved dependencies between the squads, and used a board with sticky notes to keep track of unresolved dependencies.
- 13. Development vs Operations A common source of dependency issues at many companies is development vs operations. Most companies we’ve worked with have some kind of a handoff from dev to ops, with associated friction and delays. Create a separate operations team. Their job is not to make releases for the squads - their job is to give the squads the support they need to release code themselves; support in the form of infrastructure, scripts, and routines. They are, in a sense, “building the road to production”. It’s an informal but effective collaboration, based on face-to-face communication rather than detailed process documentation.
- 14. Chapters and Guilds • There is a downside to everything, and the potential downside to full autonomy is a loss of economies of scale. The tester in squad A may be wrestling with a problem that the tester in squad B solved last week. If all testers could get together, across squads and tribes, they could share knowledge and create tools for the benefit of all squads. • If each squad was fully autonomous and had no communication with other squads, then what is the point of having a company? • That’s why we have Chapters and Guilds. This is the glue that keeps the company together, it gives us some economies of scale without sacrificing too much autonomy.
- 15. Chapters The chapter is your small family of people having similar skills and working within the same general competency area, within the same tribe. Each chapter meets regularly to discuss their area of expertise and their specific challenges - for example the testing chapter, the web developer chapter or the backend chapter. The chapter lead is line manager for his chapter members, with all the traditional responsibilities such as developing people, setting salaries, etc. However, the chapter lead is also part of a squad and is involved in the day- to-day work, which helps him stay in touch with reality. Now, reality is always messier than pretty pictures like the one above. For example, chapter members are not evenly distributed across the squads; some squads have lots of web developers, some have none. But the picture should give you the general idea.
- 16. Guilds A Guild is a more organic and wide-reaching “community of interest”, a group of people that want to share knowledge, tools, code, and practices. Chapters are always local to a Tribe, while a guild usually cuts across the whole organization. Some examples are: the web technology guild, the tester guild, the agile coach guild, etc.. A guild often includes all the chapters working in that area and their members, for example the testing guild includes all the testers in all testing chapters, but anybody who is interested can join any guild. Each guild has a “guild coordinator” who, well, does just that
- 17. Questions?