Agile at Scale, Inspired by Spotify

This course will give you inspiring real world examples of how Spotify grew a dynamic learning organisation that continually reinforces a high-trust culture and supports highly engaged and empowered product teams.

The ”Spotify Model” of agile at scale has had a huge amount of attention in the agile community since it was first shared widely in 2012. Though never originally intended as a framework or model, the case study of Spotify’s approach to agile working has become a hit with a large number of organisations who have opted to imitate the method.

This course will help leaders and teams to understand how and why it was optimized, the challenges that come with the method, and how companies can adapt and continue to evolve while employing this strategy of agile at scale. You will gain a deep and wide knowledge of how Spotify works under the hood, which will enable you to see more options for improving organisational design with regards to your context and boundaries.

You will learn why Spotify made the decisions they made, other options which were considered, and which changes were intentional and which were emergent. This hands-on workshop will explore underlying principles and go into specific practices and mechanisms. You will learn how to combine small, autonomous teams with strategic business alignment, how to work with leadership and growing leaders, innovation and the values and beliefs which shape the culture which created ”The Spotify Model”

Joakim Sundén, the teacher of the course, has long experience from working at Spotify and was directly involved in developing several of the key concepts of “the Spotify Model”.

Example topics covered in the course:

The history of the ”Spotify Model”
How to build great autonomous teams (a.k.a. Squad or Empowered Product Teams)
Organisational structures to support the squads (Chapters, Tribes and Guilds)
How the Spotify Rhythm strategic framework and Objectives and Key Results (OKRs) can be used to create alignment instead of control
Servant Leadership in practice – developing and supporting empowered people and teams
The culture, principles and core beliefs that are fundamental to succeed with this model
Think It, Build It, Ship It, Tweak It – The Spotify Product Development Framework for Discovery and Delivery
What radical transparency and communication looks like and strategies to share knowledge and ideas in a network organization
Challenges, failed experiments, and lessons learned

Goals

The goal of this course is to provide tangible examples of how to create a great place to work that enables agile at scale. Participants will leave inspired with ideas on how to redesign their organization to better engage employees and leverage the power of empowered autonomous teams.

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