Presentation about the article 13 Big Ideas from Spotify Engineering Culture https://medium.com/@andrefaria/14-spotify-engineering-culture-big-ideas-cb18f822f9ad

1. Spotify Culture Big Ideas
@andrefaria

2. #1 Rules are a good start
but them break them when
needed
Agile matters more than
Scrum
Agile principles are more
important than practices.

3. #2 Teams should have an
end-to-end Responsibility
for what they build.
Autonomous Squad
Less than 8 people
Self organization team

4. #3 Teams should have a clear Long
Term Mission aligned with the
whole company
- Make Spotify the best place to
discover music
- Infrastructure for a/b testing.
Be autonomous but don't sub-
optimize.

5. #4 Leaders should focus on
what problems to solve and
let the teams discover the
how and solve it

6. #5 Avoid Waiting Waste
Each team is responsible for
one system. But anyone can
alter any code, so if team A
needs something in a system
managed by team B, they
can ask them, but if team B
have other priorities, team A
do not need to wait, they can
go ahead and to it.

7. #6 Release should be
routine not drama
Small frequent releases.
If it hurts do it often.
Release trains and feature
toggles.

8. #7 Fast fail recovery instead
of fail avoidance
Fail fast -> Learn Fast ->
Improve Fast
Post mortems after a
failure.

9. We care more about
innovation than predictability.
Ideia - Narrative - MVP (tweaks
based on data)
Backlog, developing,
released, impact achieved
#8 100 % predictability = 0% innovation

10. Spotify Hack Week
(Hackathon)
Do whatever you want, with
whoever, in whatever way.
Experiment friendly culture. A
or B? Don't know let's try both.
#9 Make cool things real

11. We ask what's the hypothesis,
what did we learn and what
will we try next. That enables
us to make data driven
decisions instead of
opinion-driven,
ego-driven or
authority driven decisions.
#10 Make Data Drive Decisions

12. Stop doing things that do not
add value.
Run Keep/Drop
Retrospectives.
What's the minimum viable
bureaucracy to avoid Chaos?
#11 Have a waste-repellent culture

13. - No recurring bugs.
- Really finishing stuff.
- etc…
Use an Improvement Board
with Before and After
Scenarios and actions to make
progress
#12 Build a Definition of Awesome!

14. #13 You are the culture so model the
behavior you want to see

15. Reference
http://labs.spotify.com

16. Thanks! @andrefaria
http://blog.andrefaria.com/en