Lenny Rachitsky: prediction

Transcript context

…Gustav Söderström Absolutely, absolutely. And to most people, it is still very ... Actually to a lot of ascent, even to researchers, it's a little bit magical. No one really understands fully. So I guess there's maybe some magic left in the world. Absolutely. And I think a lot of people are worried about not understanding what's going on there. Shifting to the way you all build product at Spotify. So Spotify is famous for popularizing this idea of squads and tribes. And correct me if I'm wrong, but you guys have moved away from that approach. Gustav Söderström Yeah, that's right. Okay. So I'd love to understand just why you shifted and what you learned from that approach to building product, and then just like how do you organize the teams now? What do you do now? Gustav Söderström This was something that we focused a lot on early and it turned out to be smart of us to name these things into squads and chapters and so forth. It wasn't really ... Well, maybe it was deliberately branding, but it wasn't for purposes of branding that we made it up. We made it up because we thought it was a good structure to use and we needed names for things and this was the early internet eras you were allowed to make things up. And so it was very good for where we were at the time and it certainly helped us in recruiting. It's become a little bit of a cost to us because people still think that we organize that way and it's not a very efficient way of being organized at this scale or maybe even if you started over right now because we've learned more. Gustav Söderström But I think the big difference is the idea with the squad specifically was twofold. They were supposed to be small and full stack. So squad should be about seven people and it should have front and backend, mobile, QA, agile coaches and so forth, and it should be very autonomous was the idea. And that's really what we shifted. So, first of all, as you grow the company, scaling in increments of seven engineers just creates a ton of overhead. So, obviously, our teams now tend to be much bigger, maybe two, three times that at least per manager to maybe have 14 or something instead of seven and just less overhead roles. So that's one. It looks more traditional as you learn more and is reasonable as you scale. The second big thing I think we struggle with was back then when I joined, the average age at Spotify was ... I mean, I was the oldest and this was 14 years ago. So I think the average age was probably under 30 or something and it wasn't most tech companies. Gustav Söderström And so we had coming from Sweden, which is a different culture than the US, and I love a lot of things about Swedish culture and I think we managed to keep the best parts, but Sweden is a very bottoms-up autonomous culture. There's this famous drawing on how you make decisions in Sweden. In the US, I think it's just a hierarchy. In Sweden, it's a circle. It's in a circle, no one is in the middle, there is no leader and so forth. Interesting. Gustav Söderström So I think by culture, we're very inspired by this super autonomous thing. And I think the idea with autonomy is very reasonable and the right one, which is we work and we are hiring the smartest people we can find and we pay high salaries for that. So if you're hiring smart people, one way to think about it is you're renting brain power. Gustav Söderström So if you're renting all of this expensive brain power and then you give them no room to think for themselves, that doesn't sound smart, then you should actually hire less smart people and keep your costs down or something. So I think you have to give a bunch of autonomy to actually maximize the value of the investment you're making.…

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