Agile at Scale, Inspired by Spotify (remote), April 11-13, 2023

What does it take to empower people and teams to create innovative solutions your customer will love?

Many of today’s great product companies – Google, Amazon, Apple, Netflix, Spotify, and others – have a similar approach to discover and develop their innovative solutions. They all use empowered product teams – small teams of engaged and empowered people who are given clear problems to solve and who are then trusted to come up with solutions that achieve actual results.

At Spotify we called this “autonomous squads” and it’s certainly no secret, quite the opposite – it has become known all over the world as “the Spotify model” and a large number of companies have tried to imitate the approach over the years. The white paper and the Spotify Engineering Culture videos have served to inspire thousands of organizations, but unfortunately, they have left much room for speculation and misinterpretation since they lack specifics on how Spotify got there.

The journey there, the principles at work, the options considered and tested, and the lessons learned, that’s what is really worth imitating. This course aims to help you do just that so you can figure out how to successfully choose what principles, practices, and organizational patterns that will help you develop an organization with engaged and empowered people and teams.

Joakim Sundén, the teacher of the course, was employed as an Agile Coach at Spotify from 2011 to 2017 and was directly involved in introducing several of the key concepts of “the Spotify Model”, as well as evolving them as Spotify grew from fewer than 10 to more than 200 teams.

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Example topics covered in the course:

• The Rise of the ”Spotify Model”
• Underlying core beliefs of Spotify and other great product companies
• What Empowered Teams (aka Autonomous Squad) are and how you create and support them
• How you can user Chapters, Guilds, and Hack Weeks to develop people and build strong craftsmanship cultures
• Create alignment with the company and product vision, exemplified with The Spotify Rhythm strategy framework and Objectives & Key Results (OKRs)
• How mission-based Tribes can be used to build a ”one team culture” of belonging and align teams as an organizations grows
• Servant Leadership in practice – how leaders and managers act differently to empower teams
• How Tribe Leadership teams are built to support this model
• How career development and onboarding can be used to reinforce your culture and values
• Product Discovery at Spotify – the “Think It, Build It, Ship It, Tweak It” framework
• The importance of transparency and communication
• Lots of stories and examples, including the story of how Discover Weekly was built against all odds

Goals

Provide insights into how empowered teams can be enabled and supported, even at scale
Provide tangible examples of how empowered teams work in practice.
Participants will leave inspired with ideas on how to help re-invent their organization to better engage and empower their people

This course is for…

Progressive leaders and managers
Agile Coaches, Scrum Masters, Product Managers, Project Managers, and Agile Practitioners
Organisational change agents, consultants, and HR leaders