The other day someone said to me that “they use the Spotify development model”, and I said “you who the what now?”. It was a super productive conversation that I am quite proud of.
So… in order to look like less of a n00b in the next conversation, what is the “Spotify development model”? Well, it turns out the Spotify came up with a series of tweaks to the standard Agile process in order to scale their engineering teams. If you google for “spotify development model” or “spotify agile” you’ll get lots and lots of third party blog posts about what Spotify did (I guess a bit like this one), but its surprisingly hard to find primary sources. The best I’ve found so far is this Quora answer from a former VP of Engineering at Spotify, although some of the resources he links to no longer exist.