Spotify tribes model

How you can manage your tribes if you have a spotify tribes model? Here are our solutions in this article to help you. It’s not necessary the spotify solutions but the feedbacks from companies that use similar model.

You can see our old article on the spotify model, if you’re interested :

Article: Spotify model: Agile at scale

What’s tribes in spotify (spotify tribes model)?

In Spotify, the tribes are the gathering of many squads from 5 to 8 that work together on a same global theme. We advise to have 80 peoples per tribe maximum in order to keep a reasonable sizing.

Have a Product Manager

It’s very interesting to have a Product Manager to settle the part of the product develop by all teams. He is not the manager of the product owners but it will be settle the vision and strategy of the product.

He can create a synchronisation of ceremony every weeks to ensure the consistency of the work of each team. Without synchronisation, the teams risk to work in the bad way.

Synchronization of tribes

It’s very important to do a synchronization of the tribes. For that, it’s possible to have some practices :

• classic meeting between the product managers every 2 weeks
• do a kind of pi planning
• share a program board when it’s possible
• do a global retrospective sometimes

It’s very important to have synchronized tribes during the product build. Don’t forget that because, the product will be impacted by this lack of synchronization.

Have the shared scrum master?

Sometimes, the scrum master give the impression to have many free time when he works in one team. If the squad is mature, it’s possible to be in this case.

So, it would be interesting to have one scrum master for 2 squad of the same tribe. But, be careful, these squads have to be collocated ; indeed, the scrum master would be the observer of the too squad at the same time.

I will see this practice in one company and the outcomes are very good.

Guilds to align people around the same skill

When you have guilds, don’t forget to have the guild concept. It’s very important to avoid to create silos between the different tribes. For simplicity, it’s a kind of community of practice.

Conclusion spotify tribes model

I hope that this article give you some tips to help your organization. If you have your own tips, don’t hesitate to share me them; I will complete this article with your tips.