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Comment by leoedin | Hacker News Reader

I worked for a startup in 2019 which was really pushing the "Spotify model" of team structure. Apparently it's all about self-organising teams and having no leadership. The fact the technology output of the Spotify model - the Spotify app - seemed to be kind of crap didn't seem to matter. I think the main output of the Spotify team structure was blog posts promoting the Spotify team structure.

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> Apparently it's all about self-organising teams and having no leadership.

Gross over-simplification. For anyone curious they have videos out there, though they are 10+ years old now so may no longer be accurate, but in 2019-era this was still a thing (company I worked for did it too).[1]

[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Yvfz4HGtoPc

This video was created in 2014 and was more a description of what they strived for at that point rather than of the full messy reality. Spotify quickly after that grew larger than those ideas would sustain (without changes) and rapidly became more alike any other tech corpo. Certainly around 2019-2020 it was not like in the video by any means. Some structures or names of concepts stayed way longer than the actual practices as described.

(I was active as a coach in Stockholm around this period and know multiple people, both engineers and coaches, who worked at Spotify including Henrik the author of the video.)

The Spotify model is basically just Amazon’s team-owned KPIs and independence, put into a UI so you can really see how much their app is conways law.

This is why all the sections of Amazon.com are barely coherent. AWS does this too but it’s more naturally split and text works better than stateful rich media.

> so you can really see how much their app is conways law

The headache of using the shared playlist "Jam" feature and trying to add a song without playing it directly. There is like a separate queue system for "Jam" and things work differently.

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