This was an extended version of the talk that I gave at InfoShare 2016 in GDansk. This version of the talk was presented at ao.com and Think Money in Manchester UK in May 2016. This is a remix of several earlier talks and some new content to tie Spotify's autonomy and continuous improvement culture to it's data-driven product development approach to show the complete picture. As usual, I tend to talk to slides instead of putting a lot of the content into the slides themselves, so sorry if these don't have all the info.
5. Speed of iteration beats quality of iteration -
optimizing for speed leads to faster learning,
including from failures, and faster learning leads to
higher quality; optimizing for quality is an obstacle
to speed, which undermines learning and slows
down improvements to quality.
Spotify Company Belief
15. Autonomous
adjective
au·ton·o·mous - ȯ-ˈtä-nə-məs
(of a country or region) having the freedom to govern itself or control its own affairs.
"the federation included sixteen autonomous republics"
having the freedom to act independently.
"school governors are legally autonomous"
synonyms: self-governing, independent, sovereign, free, self-ruling, self-determining, autarchic; self-sufficient
"an autonomous republic"
Full-Stack Autonomous Teams (Squads)
PO
UX
iOS
Android
K&M
QA
Backend
Agile Coach
72. I'm not joking here. I can lock a tribe lead in a room and
ask them repeatedly "so what squads do you have", and
not get clear answers. It isn't a case of "it's hard to
collect the information and keep it up to date" – it is a
case of the wave-form of org-quantas not collapsing
into reality until they are observed, and sometimes not
even then. It's Schrödinger's squads, where sometimes
the cat escaped before going in the box and sometimes
the box gets stolen before opened.
Mikael Krantz, Spotify Chief Architect
73. It is better to solve the problems
created by fluidity rather than
imposing more structure.
74. It is better to solve the problems
created by fluidity rather than
imposing more structure.
Minimum Viable
Bureaucracy
90. Investment
Investment
Time
Think it Build it Ship it Tweak it
Paper Prototypes
UI Mockups
User Testing
MVP
Employee
Testing
Gradual
Rollout
A/B Testing
User Testing
Analytics
Validation
A/B Testing
User Testing
Analytics
ValidationBeta
Testing
91. That is still a lot of full-
stack teams building the
product!