Spotify famously (if you’re a student of team organisation) blogged about their squad based approach to engineering team management and delivery back in 2014. It sounded pretty awesome, but as with all these things there’s no silver bullet, and Spotify don’t use this model themselves anymore (if they ever did) according to this article by Jeremiah Lee.

Of all the allures of startup culture, few are more desireable than the speed and nimbleness of a small team. Maintaining that feeling as a company grows is a challenge. In 2012, Spotify shared its way of working and suggested it had figured it out.¹

I was excited to see the Spotify model in action when I interviewed for a product management role at its Stockholm headquarters in 2017. However, the recruiter surprised me before the first interview. She cautioned me to not expect Spotify to be an Agile utopia.

I joined the company after it had tripled in size to 3,000 people over 18 months. I learned the famed squad model was only ever aspirational and never fully implemented. I witnessed organizational chaos as the company’s leaders incrementally transitioned to more traditional management structures.

When I asked my coworkers why the content was not removed or updated to reflect reality, I never got a good answer. Many people ironically thought the posts were great for recruiting. I no longer work at Spotify, so I am sharing my experience to set the record straight. The Spotify squad model failed Spotify and it will fail your company too.

There’s no better time and energy saver than learning from someone else’s mistakes, especially when someone has gone to the time and trouble of distilling those mistakes into a lesson, example:

Learn from Spotify’s mistakes:

– Autonomy requires alignment. Company priorities must be defined by leadership. Autonomy does not mean teams get to do whatever they want.

– Processes for cross-team collaboration must be defined. Autonomy does not mean leaving teams to self-organize every problem.

– How success is measured must be defined by leadership so people can effectively negotiate cross-team dependency prioritization.

– Autonomy requires accountability. Product management is accountable for value. The team is accountable for delivering ‘done’ increments. Mature teams can justify their independence with their ability to articulate business value, risk, learning, and the next optimal move.⁶

Collaboration is a skill that requires knowledge and practice. 

– Jeremiah Lee, Failed Squad Goals

Read in full and digest. Team organisation is a journey, and a hard one. And by ‘hard’ I mean it requires human thought because it’s fundamentally a social problem. If wasn’t hard, it’d be automated (and that’s also a reason to automate away the computable jobs, so that you have bandwidth to deal with the problems only humans can solve).

As Jeremiah points out:

You might have discovered the Spotify model because you were trying to figure out how to structure your teams. Don’t stop here. Keep researching. Leaders of companies that have withstood longer tests of time have written far more than Spotify blogged. Humans have been trying to figure out how to work together for as long as there have been humans. The industrial age and the information age changed some of the constraints, but academics studying organization theories have found timeless truths about what humans need to be successful in a collective.

Turns out, Spotify in 2012 had not figured out how to maintain the speed and nimbleness of a small team in a large organization. The company evolved beyond its eponymous model and looked outside of itself to find better answers. You should too.

Good advice.