The Agile Coach's Guide To The Galaxy

  • Coaching Organizations

    What we learned from removing all chapter leads (managers) in the IT tribe at Spotify

    Two years ago the Internal IT tribe @ Spotify was greatly understaffed but got approval to scale from 25 to 75 employees. As we started scaling we recognised that Spotifys organisational model added too many formal leadership roles for our taste and we wanted to find an organisational model that allowed us to scale without adding more formal leadership roles. During this time the existance of chapter leads was also being challenged in our tribe by our squad members. To solve both these problems we conducted an experiment where we distributed leadership responsibilities and we removed all the managers (chapter leads). I did a lightening talk about our experiment at Agila…

  • Coaching Organizations

    Things I wish I knew before I became an agile coach

    In late 2014 Daisy Pilbrow and I sent out a survey to the agile community. The survey asked agile coaches what they wish they’d known before they started coaching, what was challenging about the role, and what they’ve learned about themselves and others. With the replies Daisy and I hoped to create a short and inspiring recommendation that we could give to interns and new coaches at Spotify. The survey received 30 replies. We analysed the responses and were able to identify a few patterns that we’d like to share with you. You can find all the responses in their full format here, but we have removed peoples names to…

  • Leadership and Management

    The agile coaches @ Spotifys MBTI, DISC profiles, and perspective bias

    (The purpose with this blogpost is to share data about the agile coaches at Spotify.) Slightly more than a year ago the majority of the agile coaches at Spotify took an MBTI test (most of us took it online). Back then all coaches were distributed among 5 different types. I found that really interesting and  wondered why that was. Were we biased towards certain type? Or were certain types actually better at coaching agile to teams? Since then we’ve recruited 10 new agile coaches and I’ve been curious about what our current MBTI distribution looks like. Are we still heavy on only a few types? And what about our DISC…

  • Coaching Organizations,  Coaching Teams,  Leadership and Management

    What does an agile coach at Spotify do?

    A common question that I receive from the agile community is “What does an agile coach at Spotify actually do?” and about 2 years ago Joakim Sundén answered this question in his blogpost The agile coach role at Spotify. This blogpost is about my current focus and how it has evolved over the past months. While I won’t go into specifics about the challenges we have had and still have, I will illustrate what reality can look like for an agile coach at Spotify. Four months ago I left the IO-tribe (Infrastructure Operations) to join the six month old BITS-tribe (Business Information Technology Systems). I was the first agile coach to join (btw we’re hiring) :) and the…

  • Coaching Teams

    What happens when you send a dev team to a 3 day group development course?

    Are group development courses such as IMGD silver bullets when it comes to helping teams mature? That’s what Martin Wasielewski (also an agile coach at Spotify) and I wanted to find out. In order to find the answer we defined an experiment, and identified a 3 day group development course called S360 encounter that we would send a (willing) development team to. Our hypothesis was that: By increasing people’s self awareness, improving their self esteem, teaching them how to communicate effectively, and raising their understanding of other people’s needs, teams will become high performing. How we would evaluate this experiment Three and six months after our dev team had taken the course we would evaluate the experiment on the following:…

  • Coaching Teams

    Agile @ Spotify – behind the scenes

    A few days ago Martin Wasielewski, an Agile coach at Spotify, and I presented our perspective of  how agile we, Spotify, actually are. We interviewed each others on stage at “Agila Sverige 2014” and the questions we answered were “What surprised you when you first joined Spotify?”, “How agile do you think we are?”, and “What is it like in reality having autonomous teams?”. Unfortunately the interview is in Swedish since the conference is an annual swedish conference. If there is interest we will caption the video to English.