The Age of Agile

1.

MORE VALUE FROM LESS WORK

What we need is an entrepreneurial society in which innovation and entrepreneurship are normal, steady, and continuous.

—PETER DRUCKER¹

For Spotify—the fast-growing Swedish music streaming service with over 100 million active users and more than 30 million paying users—the true value of Agile management became dramatically apparent in mid-2015. Spotify had embraced Agile management since its launch in 2008, with swarms of self-organizing teams intent on delivering steadily more value to Spotify’s users. The premise of Agile management is that empowering bottom-up innovation will steadily add significant value for customers and the firm. Accordingly, the teams at Spotify—some 2,500 people as of mid-2016—seek to learn ...