Spotify’s Failed Squad Goals

This is a great look at the aftermath of a management fad. Too often these management trends - like bleeding edge technologies - reach a certain point in the hype cycle and become a way for new managers to make their mark on an unwitting organisation.

As an individual contributor, the level of adoption of any management technic and/or philosophy is a great signal for how conscientious the management team is. Although fads come and go, they do tend to have applicable lessons, and it is good management that is able to filter out what is fit-for-purpose vs just cargo cult-ing and parroting whatever they read in a blog post.

I find it interesting that while developers have to memorise patterns, algorithms, and essentially prove base knowledge, that the same level of academic rigour is rarely applied to managers.

Managers can jump on the Spotify Model without appreciating that it's just a rebrand, or to be generous - tech-centric remix, of matrix/cross-functional team structures; thus missing out on understanding when such an approach would be useful and the support that is needed to make such an organisational structure work.

Optimizing for efficient, capable teams is a difficult problem, and seemingly untenable above a certain size by nature. With that in mind, the obvious answer (especially in software) seems to be to keep teams as small as possible. Netflix's strategy is higher half the people, pay them twice as much, and give them as much autonomy as possible according to the CEO's new book. The obvious counterpoint to that strategy is it leads to overwork and will inevitably devolve above a certain size as well.

For a more radical strategy on keeping company size small, I like how the startup Stedi has taken a crack at innovating on this. Their entire tech stack is structured around AWS offerings, mainly serverless. The idea is that by paying a premium to Amazon, they can outsource all server management, scaling, etc. issues which typically take up tons of engineering bandwidth. Presumably, Amazon's round the clock experienced team will also be able to handle it more effectively than they could. In the meantime, Stedi can now avoid hiring for tons of jobs and keep headcount as small as possible, enabling engineers to only work on things that matter.

While I'm not sure how Stedi's strategy will play out, it is one of the few opinionated stances on company organizational philosophy that attempts to take advantage of recent evolution in cloud offerings, and internalize the consequences of those improvements.

I joined Spotify early 2018 as well and could not agree with this article more. Well said.

I'm the author. Thank you for sharing!