Thinking of Replacing Scrum with the Spotify Model? Start with Your Delivery Problems
Renaming teams as Squads will not fix slow delivery. Before adopting the Spotify Model, examine the dependencies, engineering practices, and decision rights holding your teams back.
Arkadiusz Kozieł
A new org chart is not a delivery strategy
When Scrum becomes difficult to scale, a familiar proposal appears: call teams *Squads*, group them into *Tribes*, and organize specialists into *Chapters*. The names sound fresh. The underlying delivery problems usually remain.
Spotify shared a description of how its teams worked at a particular point in time—not a turnkey framework for other companies to install. If you are considering a redesign, look beyond the labels.
1. You may be copying an aspiration, not a blueprint
The widely circulated Spotify materials described an evolving organization, including ideas it was still working toward. Treating that account as a proven, fixed model misses the point. Ask which practices address your specific constraints instead of reproducing a diagram from another company.
2. A matrix can make decisions harder
Chapter Leads, Product Managers, and autonomous Squads can work together well when their responsibilities are explicit. When they are not, product and engineering trade-offs become a round of negotiations across reporting lines. A new structure that leaves nobody clearly responsible for resolving delivery conflicts may add escalation rather than speed.
3. Autonomy needs alignment
Squad autonomy is valuable, but it is not independence from every shared decision. Without agreed approaches to architecture, integration, and cross-team planning, teams can solve the same problems repeatedly while dependencies become harder to manage. Give teams room to decide—and clear ways to coordinate.
4. New names will not repair old systems
Calling a department a Tribe will not simplify a tightly coupled application or improve a fragile deployment pipeline. If teams cannot test, release, and learn reliably, an org chart redesign is unlikely to change delivery outcomes on its own.
Fix the constraint before changing the structure
Before replacing Scrum, identify what is actually slowing you down. Is it unclear ownership, too many handoffs, technical debt, weak engineering practices, or decisions that take too long? Improve those conditions first. Then decide whether a structural change would help—and measure its effect on delivery, not its resemblance to Spotify.