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

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 solve the problem.