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

This presentation was recorded at GOTO Aarhus 2023. #GOTOcon #GOTOaar https://gotoaarhus.com 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 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 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: https://gotoaarhus.com/2023/sessions/2579 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://twitter.com/GOTOcon https://www.linkedin.com/company/goto- https://www.facebook.com/GOTOConferences #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 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