The top 3 points you should have paid attention to in the Spotify Engineering Culture videos that aren’t Squads, Chapters, Tribes, Guilds

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Most of the time when someone mentions the “Spotify Model”, they only talk about structure: Squads, Chapters, Tribes, Guilds.

When it comes to product development culture, structure is the last thing you should be worried about, not the first.

Without even looking at specific contexts, 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:

1. Aligned autonomy;
2. Creating trust-at-scale (across boundaries);
3. Decoupling (to enable autonomy)

Aligned autonomy

From part 1,

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

Alignment vs Autonomy (picture extracted from part 1, drawn by

Henrik Kniberg

)

Low alignment, low autonomy means no communication of the problem that needs to be solved AND people are just told to shut-up and follow orders.

High alignment, low autonomy means effective communication of the problem to be solved BUT people are still told exactly how to…