My critique of “the Spotify Model”: Part 1

Jason Yip
8 min readJan 23

Part 2 here

People ask me about this, so I figured I’d write something.

NOTE: Although I was at Spotify for around 8 years, I‘m not familiar with how every area worked and I have my own biases, preferences, etc. AND things change

I will define “Spotify Model” as any concept or practice mentioned in the Spotify Engineering Culture videos. I’m only covering part 1 in this post.

Agile > Scrum

Jason Yip

Senior Manager Product Engineering at Grainger. Extreme Programming, Agile, Lean guy. Ex-Spotify, ex-ThoughtWorks, ex-CruiseControl