Brandon Klein Brandon understands that better teams are fundamental to all of our success. As a global thought leader, ushering in the 'Future of Work' revolution, he paves the way using data + design to accelerate the Collaboration Revolution. Brandon is the Co-Founder of the software start-up, Collaboration.Ai and an active member of The Value Web, a non-profit committed to changing the way decisions are made to better impact our world. Feb 20

How Spotify Balances Employee Autonomy and Accountability

The squad structure achieves autonomy without sacrificing accountability. Every squad owns its features throughout the product’s life cycle, and the squads have full visibility into their features’ successes and failures. There is no single appointed leader of a squad; any such leadership role is emergent and informal. Results are visible both through internal reviews and through customer feedback, and squads are expected to fully understand successes and failures. Squads go through postmortem analyses of failures to ensure learning, and some squad rooms have “fail walls.” Every few weeks, squads conduct retrospectives to evaluate what is going well and what needs to improve.

To ensure that the feedback process is effective for individuals as well as for the squads, Spotify redesigned its performance management system to separate salary discussion and performance evaluations from coaching and feedback. Before, peer feedback was incorporated into salary reviews; in Spotify’s words, that “incentivized people to gather as many favorable reviews as possible rather than getting feedback around their biggest areas of potential improvement.” Now, colleagues use an internal tool to invite anyone — including managers, peers, and direct reports — to provide feedback on results and on what an individual can do to improve. Employees may solicit feedback as often as they choose. Spotify employee Jonas Aman told us, “The result is a process that everyone needs to own and drive themselves — it is about development and personal growth.”

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Brandon Klein Brandon understands that better teams are fundamental to all of our success. As a global thought leader, ushering in the 'Future of Work' revolution, he paves the way using data + design to accelerate the Collaboration Revolution. Brandon is the Co-Founder of the software start-up, Collaboration.Ai and an active member of The Value Web, a non-profit committed to changing the way decisions are made to better impact our world.