Spotify Model

The Spotify Model is a product organisation described by Spotify in 2012 in two articles by Henrik Kniberg. It structures teams into squads (autonomous cross-functional teams aligned on a mission), tribes (groupings of squads on the same domain), chapters (cross-cutting skills, e.g. all iOS engineers) and guilds (informal interest communities).

The goal is to combine the autonomy of a startup with the shared resources of a large organisation. The model was massively copied in the 2010s — sometimes badly — and Spotify itself has since evolved and publicly acknowledged its limits.

Don't adopt it to the letter — use it as inspiration to structure an autonomous product organisation.