How Autonomy Saved One of Spotify’s Most Loved Features • Joakim Sunden • GOTO 2023

This presentation was recorded at GOTO Aarhus 2023. #GOTOcon #GOTOaar Joakim Sundén - Consultant, Speaker, Coach, Teacher at Crisp @joakimsunden-crisp ORIGINAL TALK TITLE How Autonomy Saved One of Spotify’s Most Loved Features From Being Killed RESOURCES ABSTRACT “I would have killed that if it was just me, 100%,” said Spotify founder and CEO Daniel Ek about Discover Weekly, a feature that would become one of Spotify’s most loved product features, almost a brand in itself. Designers and senior engineers were equally skeptical, but the team was still able to ship the feature. In this talk, you’ll learn how Spotify’s organizational culture of Agile management and autonomous teams enables innovation, using the Discover Weekly feature as an example. [...] TIMECODES 00:00 Intro 00:50 Discover Weekly 05:31 Spotify HQ 06:31 Radio 07:12 Discover 09:20 Re-connecting the dots 11:34 “Traditional“ organizations 13:47 Autonomous squad 15:27 4 Risks in product development 17:50 Focused on outcomes, not output 18:41 Activities, epics, features, stories 18:57 These bets have a low success rate 20:09 Moving from opinions to data 20:38 Alignment – Autonomy 22:04 Aligned autonomy 25:33 Gatekeeping vs facilitating context 28:27 Iterate, iterate, iterate 28:43 Experiments 32:17 Winning formula 33:52 Employee release 34:44 Daniel Ek 35:07 Celebrate failure 35:52 Limit blast radius 36:27 Watching the data 36:57 Watching the buzz 37:21 Conclusions 42:25 Innovation can’t be forced 42:38 Outro Download slides and read the full abstract here: RECOMMENDED BOOKS Joakim Sunden & Marcus Hammarberg • Kanban in Action • Ron Kohavi, Diane Tang & Ya Xu • Trustworthy Online Controlled Experiments • Gene Kim, Jez Humble, Nicole Forsgren, Patrick Debois & John Willis • The DevOps Handbook • Matthew Skelton & Manuel Pais • Team Topologies • Jennifer Petoff, Niall Murphy, Betsy Beyer & Chris Jones • Site Reliability Engineering • Marty Cagan • Inspired • Marty Cagan • Empowered • Reed Hastings & Erin Meyer • No Rules Rules • Forsgren, Humble & Kim • Accelerate: The Science of Lean Software and DevOps • Fred Brooks Jr. • The Mythical Man-Month • #Spotify #SpotifyFeature #Autonomy #SoftwareEngineering #Programming #DiscoverWeekly #Agile #AgileDevelopment #JoakimSunden #Crisp #Kanban #Data #ContinuousImprovement #AlignedAutonomy Looking for a unique learning experience? Attend the next GOTO conference near you! Get your ticket at Sign up for updates and specials at SUBSCRIBE TO OUR CHANNEL - new videos posted almost daily.