The Spotify Model is amazing, but you don’t want to use it
You’ve probably heard of the Spotify Model.
If you google it you get a bunch of amazing articles describing what an awesome process they have, why it works for them and the challenges they are facing as they continue to grow.
Here’s a great recent summary by Jurriaan Kamer.
I’m not going to talk about what the Spotify Model is in this article, so please go read the above if your at all curious.
Coming back to that google search, you’ll probably also notice that a lot of the articles end with something akin to “but don’t use it yourself”.
So, while I completely understand why an organisation might look at the Spotify Model and think “I want some of that!”, do I think an organisation should adopt the Spotify Model? Absolutely not. Let’s talk about why.
The obvious and flippant reason is that you’re not a global company based in Stockholm providing music to millions of users … ie, you’re not Spotify so why would their model fit you? But as I’ve already mentioned, if you’re an organisation whose leaders aren’t familiar with agile, or who are early on in their agile journey, this reasoning isn’t obvious at all. In fact, copying what the other, more successful guy does is pretty much the goto for a lot of managers.
Here’s a spoiler, while adopting the Spotify model might look attractive, it’s actually not what you want. You don’t want to look like Spotify did in 2012, what you _really_ want is to be as successful as Spotify. There’s a difference.
Let’s unpack that last paragraph a little bit. Say you are Spotify in 2018. Your business is booming, but it’s not all rosy. You’re facing challenges now that your organisation has grown so dramatically and you’re having trouble herding all those dev cats towards a common vision. Do you say, “well things were really good in 2012, lets reorganise back to the model we had then”? No, of course not, because your organisation is different now to what it was then. But of course, Spotify don’t need to go backwards to improve, because they never actually stopped going forward.
The secret sauce is that the Spotify Model in and of itself isn’t agile. If, like me, you believe agile is a mindset, a way of approaching problems, then it can’t be. It’s just a particular process and set of practices that worked for them, at that particular time, when they where a particular size.
No, the model isn’t agile, but the process that Spotify used to evolve the Spotify Model is agile. The same process that they continue to use to evolve the way they work. Right now. At this very moment, they are inspecting and adapting to improve. Agile isn’t something you achieve or attain, it’s a journey, full of ups and downs. Teams change, organisations change, why would your process be any different?
I’ve been building software using agile for nearly 14 years and the one constant is that being agile is hard and requires serious discipline to maintain. You must be constantly reflecting on where you are, where you want to be and what does a small step towards that state look like. Then you must take that step and measure the result. That’s how you improve and evolve your process. Not to spoil the ending, but it’s also the secret to getting your own process moving and driving your organisation forward. But I’ll come back to that.
Don’t confuse the above with thinking that you should be working in a bubble. It’s critically important that we continue to look at others, to see new ways of working, to broaden our horizons and look for better ways. It’s the first line of the Manifesto for Agile Software Development (emphasis is mine):
We are uncovering better ways of developing software by doing it and helping others do it.
While we can learn from others, we can’t simple take what they do, apply it to our organisation and expect it to work. That’s not agile, that’s just a Big Bang process change. People (read your employees) don’t like change, especially when they may not understand or even agree with the reasons for the change. It’s especially problematic if your leaders don’t understand the reason for the change either. This type of change must be driven top-down, by leaders demonstrating behavioural change. You can’t tell your teams to be agile, then continue to manage the company the same way you did for the last 30 years.
So If you can’t just lift and shift Spotify onto your organisation what can you do? You follow the agile process and do what we always do when unsure:
- Stop, look around at where you are.
- Think about where you want to be.
- Take a small step towards that goal.
- Rinse and repeat.
Don’t get me wrong, organisational change is hard. Really hard. There are some fabulous resources online for how to approach it and incredible people like Johanna Rothman, Pat Reed and Steve Denning just to name a few are much better at it and are far better at articulating the problems than I am. Go read their (and others) stuff, it’s amazing.
As a primer The Basics of Agile Transformation is a good place to start.
Sure, you could spend major $$ on restructuring your organisation to look exactly like Spotify in 2012 … but you’re still going to be at the start of your organisations transformation, because as I said before, agile isn’t a thing to attain, it’s the journey, the day to day evolution of your organisation towards the vision its leaders set for it. Without the vision and leadership from the top, without that constant reflection and inspect and adapt loop, you sure might look like Spotify did, but was that the goal? Or was it to be as successful as Spotify? If it’s the latter, start by understanding how Spotify became successful. And here’s a hint, it wasn’t by adopting someone elses model ;)
