How Autonomy Saved One of Spotify’s Most Loved Features • Joakim Sunden • YOW! 2024

This presentation was recorded at YOW! Australia 2024. #GOTOcon #YOW https://yowcon.com Joakim Sundén - Founding Partner at Better Product Work & Co-Creator of the Spotify Model @joakimsunden-crisp ORIGINAL TALK TITLE How Autonomy Saved One of Spotify’s Most Loved Features From Being Killed RESOURCES https://bsky.app/profile/joakimsunden.bsky.social https://twitter.com/joakimsunden https://linkedin.com/in/joakimsunden https://joakimsunden.com 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 organisational culture of Agile management and autonomous teams enables innovation, using the Discover Weekly feature as an example. [...] TIMECODES 00:00 Intro 02:14 Discover Weekly 05:16 Spotify HQ 06:12 Radio 06:50 Discover 09:54 Re-connecting the dots 12:44 "Traditional" organizations 15:06 Autonomous squad 16:53 4 Risks in product development 18:12 Focused on outcomes, not output 19:11 Activities, epics, features, stories 19:27 These bets have a low success rate 21:03 Moving from opinions to data 20:38 Alignment – Autonomy 21:37 Aligned autonomy 22:57 Gatekeeping vs facilitating context 25:29 Iterate, iterate, iterate 27:07 Daniel Ek 27:32 Celebrate failure 27:55 Limit blast radius 28:37 Watching the data 28:57 Watching the buzz 29:28 Experiments 32:59 Winning formula 33:36 Conclusions 38:13 Innovation can't be forced 38:24 Outro Download slides and read the full abstract here: https://yowcon.com/brisbane-2024/sessions/3442 RECOMMENDED BOOKS Joakim Sunden & Marcus Hammarberg • Kanban in Action • https://amzn.to/3n1Fmna Ron Kohavi, Diane Tang & Ya Xu • Trustworthy Online Controlled Experiments • https://amzn.to/3JlY4NZ Gene Kim, Jez Humble, Nicole Forsgren, Patrick Debois & John Willis • The DevOps Handbook • https://amzn.to/3C0Rj0C Matthew Skelton & Manuel Pais • Team Topologies • http://amzn.to/3sVLyLQ Jennifer Petoff, Niall Murphy, Betsy Beyer & Chris Jones • Site Reliability Engineering • https://amzn.to/3xYac2Q Marty Cagan • Inspired • https://amzn.to/3dPz7iq Marty Cagan • Empowered • https://amzn.to/42kuKAj Reed Hastings & Erin Meyer • No Rules Rules • https://amzn.to/3Cjottx Forsgren, Humble & Kim • Accelerate: The Science of Lean Software and DevOps • https://amzn.to/3tCz1xO Fred Brooks Jr. • The Mythical Man-Month • https://amzn.to/31NJc5C https://bsky.app/profile/gotocon.com https://twitter.com/GOTOcon https://www.linkedin.com/company/goto- https://www.instagram.com/goto_con https://www.facebook.com/GOTOConferences #Spotify #SpotifyFeature #Autonomy #SoftwareEngineering #Programming #DiscoverWeekly #Agile #AgileDevelopment #JoakimSunden #Crisp #Kanban #Data #ContinuousImprovement #AlignedAutonomy #YOWcon CHANNEL MEMBERSHIP BONUS Join this channel to get early access to videos & other perks: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCs_tLP3AiwYKwdUHpltJPuA/join Looking for a unique learning experience? Attend the next GOTO conference near you! Get your ticket at https://gotopia.tech Sign up for updates and specials at https://gotopia.tech/newsletter SUBSCRIBE TO OUR CHANNEL - new videos posted almost daily. https://www.youtube.com/user/GotoConferences/?sub_confirmation=1