At Spotify, their teams are called squads. These small cross-functional teams, similar to a Scrum team, are often grouped in what they call tribes of up to 100 people. A tribe usually focuses on one aspect of Spotify's business, for example, a tribe that focuses on native mobile apps. A tribe's collection of squads will often co-locate in the same area.
There are many tribes at Spotify, spread across many different locations around the globe. This distributed nature presents a challenge for an organization that needs to move coherently across its music player product range.
Creating alignment is key when we have a high degree of autonomy in our teams so that we can move quickly, unencumbered by a chain ...