Decentralized decision-making and scaled autonomy at Spotify

While modern software companies strive to increase team autonomy enable them successfully operate the piece of they develop and deploy, efficient ways orchestrate work multiple autonomous teams working in parallel are still poorly understood. In this paper, we report how is maintained at Spotify scale, based on retrospectives, interviews with managers archival analysis corporate databases procedures. particular, describe managerial authority decentralized through various workgroups collective authority, what compromises made ensure alignment which team-related factors can further hinder autonomy. Our findings show that scaled does not mean anarchy, or unlimited permissiveness. Instead, squads expected take responsibility for their coordinate, communicate align actions others, comply a few enabling constraints. Further, many decisions independently without management control due efforts bypass formal boundary structures. Mechanisms strategies self-organization related effective sharing codebase, achieving alignment, networking knowledge sharing, described guide other scale