Agile Transformations Using The “Spotify Model”: Lessons From The Trenches

For a long time Spotify people (including me!) have tried to convince the world that there is no “Spotify Model” and if there ever was one, Spotify isn’t using it anyway and you shouldn’t either. And yet, countless organizations are using the Spotify model to drive their agile transformations, some of them claiming huge successes. So, let’s stop kidding ourselves and instead look at how the Spotify model is actually being used and what we can learn from these organizations. This talk will be structured around the change journey of one organization that I worked with for two years, where we used tribes, squads and other “Spotify concepts” as part of the transformation. I will share lessons from what I believe worked well and what I believe could have been done in a better way. I will also incorporate the experience from other client work as well as from having run the course “Agile at Scale, Inspired by Spotify” dozens of times all over the world.