Spotify Labs recently released part 2 of the animated video describing the company’s engineering culture, including their implementation of agile engineering practices. The culture at the company is a journey in progress, not a journey completed, so the video is somewhere between “How Things Are Today” and “How We Want Things To Be.”
In part 1, we learned that the company bases their culture on agile principals and their engineering happens in squads—loosely coupled and tightly aligned. That allows for an internal open-source model for code. Their culture, based around their people, focuses on motivation, community and trust rather than say, structure and control.
In part 2, the video talks about the focus on failure and making mistakes faster than anyone else. So in essence, the company is learning fast so they can improve fast from their failures. This idea of a fail-friendly environment allows for fast failure recovery as apposed to failure avoidance.
A healthy culture heals a broken process. You are the culture…so model the behavior you wan to see.
