In this talk, we cover: - What is an Agile Coach at Spotify? - What do they do? - Why do we believe they help us win? We also talk about: - How do we scale or Organisation? - High Performing Teams (What is a high performing team?) - How are we measuring High Performance right now? - How do we help teams reach High Performance? Appendix: - Chapter = Competency group - Chapter Lead = Hiring Manager for Developer (or other) competency

1. How Agile Coaches Help Us Win
The Agile Coach Role @ Spotify
Kristian Lindwall
Agile coach team lead
@klindwall
Brendan Marsh
Agile coach
@brendanmarsh

2. Inspiration for this talk

3. What is Spotify?
How do we
scale Agile?
What is an
Agile Coach?
3

8. 8
The right music for every moment

11. 11
24M active users.
6M paying subscribers.
20M songs.

12. 12
55 countries

13. Growing fast
30
3 years ago

14. Growing fast
Tribes
10
100
Provide fast and
reliable access to all
the world's music
250
30
Chapter
Chapter
Chapter
Enable high product
development speed
while maintaining a
highly available service
Chapter
P
P
P
P
Squad Squad Squad Squad
P
P
P
P
Squad Squad Squad Squad
Now

15. How do we scale?
15

16. Squad
•
Self-organizing
•
• Cross-functional
5-7 engineers, less than 10
•
“Feel like a mini-startup”
C
P

17. Example squads

18. Pics of squad rooms

21. Provide fast and
reliable access to all
the world's music
Tribes
Chapter
Chapter
Chapter
Enable high product
development speed
while maintaining a
highly available service
Chapter
P
P
P
P
Squad Squad Squad Squad
P
P
P
P
Squad Squad Squad Squad

22. Squad (Servant) Leadership
“POTLAC”
Agile Coach
Chapter Lead(s)
Product Owner
How are we supporting
our team?

23. Scope of the Agile Coach
Individuals
Squads
Agile Coaches
Tribes

24. 24
The agile coach

25. Our primary goal:
High performing
teams and a high
performing
organization
!

26. Motivated people...
building valuable,
quality products...
...fast!

27. How do we help them
reach high performance?
March 7, 2014

28. 28
By going
above and beyond
the call of an
Agile Practitioner

29. Sprints
Scrum
XP
Planning Poker
User stories
We definitely do the basics...
Stand ups
Demos
Story Points
Kanban
Retrospectives
March 7, 2014

30. Agile - Lean
Practitioner
Lyssa Adkins - The Agile Coaching Competency Framework

31. Teaching
Mentoring
Lyssa Adkins - The Agile Coaching Competency Framework
Agile - Lean
Practitioner
Coaching
Facilitating

32. Teaching
Agile - Lean
Practitioner
Mentoring
Technical
Mastery
Lyssa Adkins - The Agile Coaching Competency Framework
Coaching
Facilitating
Business
Mastery
Transformational
Mastery

33. 33
Some recent examples
of this in practice

34. 1 on 1 coaching
- Team members
- Product owners
- Chapter leads
- Senior management
Coaching

35. Agile - Lean
Practitioner
Team offsite
- Full day(s) offsite
- Team building
- Problem Solving
Teaching
Facilitating

36. Agile - Lean
Practitioner
PO book club
- Series of lunch and learns
- Challenges POs
- What is the impact of planned work?
Teaching
Facilitating
Business
Mastery

37. TDD/XP workshop
- 2 day workshop
- Facilitated by coach and CL
- Focus on engineering skills
Agile - Lean
Practitioner
Teaching
Facilitating
Technical
Mastery

38. Agile - Lean
Practitioner
Squad
roadmapping
- Group of coaches came up
with new visualization
- Ran workshops with all squads in a tribe
Facilitating
Business
Mastery

39. Agile - Lean
Practitioner
Bootcamp
- 2 week induction
- Tech Introduction - “From Click to Play”
- Agile Introduction
Teaching
Mentoring
Coaching
Facilitating

40. Agile - Lean
Practitioner
Continuous Delivery
Unconference
- Lightning Talks
- Open Space
- Initiatives
!
Teaching
Technical
Mastery
Coaching
Facilitating

41. 41
Putting it all
together

43. How do we know how
we’re doing?

44. 44
Most recent model

45. An Example...
45

46. Section name
How do WE grow?
•Conferences / Meetups
•Training / Workshop
•Thought Leader Talks
•Mentoring
•Pairing
•Agile Practices Sharing
•Lean coffee
•Unconference
46

47. Section name
Recap
First level text
• Second level
– Third level
– Fourth level
Recap
47

48. Kristian Lindwall
Agile coach team lead
lindwall@spotify.com
@klindwall
Brendan Marsh
Agile coach
brendanm@spotify.com
@brendanmarsh
brendanmarsh.com

49. Copyright stuff
Napster pic by bixentro, cc 2.0
http://www.flickr.com/photos/bixentro/
!
Airplane pic by wildhaber
http://www.flickr.com/photos/wildhaber/5976264120/Kuster & Wildhaber Photography
!
Busy record store pic by gomattolson
http://www.flickr.com/photos/gomattolson
!
Empty record store pic by passetti
http://www.flickr.com/photos/passetti/
March 7, 2014