Dr. Mario's 2nd 🧠

Failed SquadGoals

3 min read

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Even at the time we wrote it, we weren’t doing it. It was part ambition, part approximation. People have really struggled to copy something that didn’t really exist. (View Highlight)

It worries me when people look at what we do and think it’s a framework they can just copy and implemen (View Highlight)

Without a single engineering manager responsible for the engineers on a team, the product manager lacked an equivalent peer—the mini-CTO to their mini-CEO role. There was no single person accountable for the engineering team’s delivery (View Highlight)

A product—design—engineering team typically contains more engineers than designers or product managers. Having a single engineering manager for the engineers on the team creates an accountable escalation path for conflict within the team. (View Highlight)

Product managers should have an equivalent peer for engineering. Product managers should be accountable for the prioritization of work. Engineering managers should be accountable for the engineers’ execution, which includes being able to negotiate speed and quality tradeoffs with the product manager. (View Highlight)

As a company grows from startup to scale-up, duplicated functions across teams move to new teams dedicated to increasing organization efficiency by reducing duplication. With more teams, the need for a team to shift initiative decreases in frequency. Both of these changes allow for teams to think more deeply and long term about the problems they are scoped to solve. Faster iteration, however, is not guaranteed. Every responsibility a team cedes to increase its focus becomes a new cross-team dependency. (View Highlight)

Autonomy requires alignment. Company priorities must be defined by leadership. Autonomy does not mean teams get to do whatever they want. (View Highlight)

Processes for cross-team collaboration must be defined. Autonomy does not mean leaving teams to self-organize every problem. (View Highlight)

Every time you have a new team, they have to reinvent the wheel in how they should be working. Maybe, just maybe, we should have a ‘minimum viable agility’. You start with that. You are free to opt out, but people shouldn’t have to opt-in all the time. (View Highlight)

Collaboration is a skill that requires knowledge and practice. Managers should not assume people have an existing comprehension of Agile practices. (View Highlight)

Had Spotify referred to these ideas by their original names, perhaps it could have evaluated them more fairly when they failed instead of having to confront changing its cultural identity simply to find internal processes that worked well. (View Highlight)

Business units, departments, teams, and managers more effectively communicate organization structure roles and responsibilities than Spotify’s synonyms and are not attached to a way of working that failed their creator. (View Highlight)

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