This article was published on June 23, 2022
It's all about finding the right strategy for your team
This article was originally published on .cult by Yasas Sri Wickramasinge. .cult is a Berlin-based community platform for developers. We write about all things career-related, make original documentaries, and share heaps of other untold developer stories from around the world.
All the successful product engineering teams have one common practice: a winning product development strategy. But, it is not realistic to find a universal product development strategy for different product teams.
This article presents seven different yet successful product development strategies so you can create your own plan or improve the existing strategies inspired by these practices.
1. Purpose-driven independent squads: Spotify strategy
The world popular music streaming platform, Spotify , has a speciality in their organizational hierarchy. Instead of having a conventional management structure, Spotify maintains different groups called Squads, Tribes, Alliances, and Guilds. This is entirely new labelling of group structures is inspired by the “Growth Mindset.”
Together with this different organizational structure, they’ve developed the “Spotify Model,” their own version of product development.
This model gives each product team (“Squad”) freedom to pick their preferred project management frameworks such as Agile Scrum, Kanban, or others.
“Discover the Spotify model” at Atlassian
Each team in the same organization performs in their way. However, the Spotify model encourages Squads to work together on high-level objectives. When multiple Squads are together to address high-level goals, that composite group structure is called a “Tribe”.
The next category is the “Chapter”, which is an independent entiry with extremely advanced specialization in specific areas such as Quality Assurance, User Experience, Application Security, etc. Usually, chapters include senior leads or architects, and they help each Squad level up their product.