Attach to Process

Interesting read on “the Spotify model”, why Spotify themselves don’t use it and neither should you.

While Spotify gave teams control over their way of working, many people did not have a basic understanding of Agile practices. This resulted in teams iterating through process tweaks in blind hope of finding the combination that would help them improve their delivery. People lacked a common language to effectively discuss the process problems, the education to solve them, and the experience to evaluate performance. It was not really agile. It was just not-waterfall.

Huh, this seems awfully familiar.

When Agile Scrum introduced new meanings to a bunch of words like burn-down and sprint, it did so because it introduced new concepts that needed names. Spotify introduced the vocabulary of missions, tribes, squads, guilds, and chapter leads for describing its way of working. It gave the illusion it had created something worthy of needing to learn unusual word choices. However, if we remove the unnecessary synonyms from the ideas, the Spotify model is revealed as a collection of cross-functional teams with too much autonomy and a poor management structure.

When I first learned about “the Spotify model”, I loved the idea of getting to work in a tribe, squad or guild. I thought it sounded pretty cool. I bet it appealed to most developers who've played MMOs before.

Link: Failed #SquadGoals

Tags: #Bookmarks #Agile #SoftwareDevelopmentManagement

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