#17 - Spotify’s Culture, Cold Brew Coffee at Home, Calisthenics, Management Incentives
May 28, 2020: Learning about Spotify’s Culture from Corporate Rebel’s 2-part report, learning to cold brew coffee at home from Starbucks, external validation on OMD Daily, rethinking about management from the Focused Compounding podcast
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Episode Notes:
Cold brew coffee at home
Spotify's Culture
Org. structure is made up of Squads, Tribes, Chapters and Guilds.
Squad:
Composed of 6 to 12 people and designed to feel like a mini-startup
Self-organizing team and decide their own way of working - some use Scrum sprints, some use Kanban, some use a mix of these approaches and [some build their own ideal way of working]
Each squad sticks with one mission and one part of the product for a long time
Each squad gets a personal 'huddle' room
Squads are fully autonomous and 100% responsible for a single feature
Tribe
Collection of squads in related product areas
Tribe are all physically in the same office, normally right next to each other, and the lounge areas nearby promote collaboration between the squads
There is a tribe lead but it acts as an autonomous organism
Tribes are designed to be smaller than [150] people or so, with an ideal size of 40.
Group of tribes has responsibility for top line metrics.”
Chapters
Group of people with similar skill sets
Chapter lead is a line manager for his chapter members, with all the traditional responsibilities such as developing people, setting salaries etc.
Chapter lead is also part of a squad and is involved in the day-to-day work, which helps him stay in touch with reality
Guilds
Cut across organizations
Additional Notes:
Line managers act as coaches/managers to their chapters and they are also part-time contributors of that similar line of work (i.e. developers)
Johan Sellgren (HR Business Partner) puts it: "We provide our people with lots of responsibilities and trust. It's okay and safe to fail, but you have to learn from it. If you make the same mistake twice, that might be a potential sign that you're not developing yourself enough. The growth mind-set needs to come from the employees themselves, as in the end we all need to get things done"
Coaching approach: continuous 1-on-1 coaching sessions where we tell each other the truth about the performance
Hold individual 'development talks' twice a year where we address the future (70%) the now (20%) and the past (10%)
Every three weeks Daniel Ek shares the latest developments with all his employees in so-called town hall meetings. Topics range from financials to organizational changes to updates on competitors
First part of interview process is culture interview
Innovative culture is an enumeration of collective values which are bottom up defined and under constant review
Spotify's leadership conducted a world tour to hold specially designed 'value workshops' in order to define their 3 core values. To get everyone actively involved, they started their operation at the smallest offices around the world and worked their way up to the biggest offices in NYC and Stockholm
Stock options available for everyone
Looking at incentives of lower management vs. upper management