A company with a mission to unleash human creativity by enabling creative freedom and livelihood for 1 million artists while creating a direct connection to billions of fans? Welcome to the fabulous world of Spotify!
Founded in Stockholm in 2006, Spotify is now the world's largest music streaming subscription service. Similarly to technology-platform-based businesses (Youtube, Uber), it has built a marketplace in which users and artists are both accessible. In addition to providing a basic service, the system is able to analyze and evaluate users' listening preferences and consumer habits, thus offering artists a tool that allows them to get a more accurate picture of their fan base and preferences faster than ever before.
Spotify’s success was also greatly influenced by its founders’ belief that speed and flow are key to serving a growing consumer base. In addition to maximizing resource utilization, constant continuity in both development and service delivery provides a significant advantage over competing service providers. Another important realization is that the focus is on the purpose and objectives of the process, not the activities of the process. Accordingly, the company has organized its product development into several cross-functional, autonomous teams. Each team is responsible for achieving its own goals, but can develop its own working methods that it considers most appropriate for getting the job done.
One of the biggest moments in the company’s life was its 2017 IPO, which involved ensuring that Spotify’s teams around the world were working in “flows” and that compliance was in place. Applying the right agile mindset and principles, Spotify went public on the New York Stock Exchange on April 3, 2018, under the ticker symbol ‘SPOT’.
Key to success: Spotify culture meets ITIL ®
In addition to the aforementioned “speed”, transparency, visualization and agile thinking are the driving force and mantra of Spotify as an organization. Over the years, the Spotify team has become accustomed to clear “missions”, as well as the development of tactics and skills within the team. The developed mindset has completely determined the work and the direction of development. This operation can provide an outstanding operation for an organization to a certain extent, but in order to provide uninterrupted service, manage increased tasks and staff, it is important that all this is organized into an appropriate framework, such as ITIL ® itself .
With the help of external support, Spotify successfully identified areas where changes and corrections were needed in the organization to improve their performance. These highlighted shortcomings in overall workload transparency, activity management, supporting internal “customer” needs, and handling different types of tasks.
The identified areas were addressed through ideas and philosophies that became known as the principles of the ITIL ® 4 guidance, introduced in February 2019.
- Focusing on values
- Let's start where we are right now.
- Gradual progress supported by feedback
- Facilitate collaboration and visualization
- Comprehensive thinking and working
- Striving for simplicity and practicality
- Optimization and automation
The principles, both individually and collectively, provided significant added value by providing teams with the right focus and direction to address deficiencies or less-than-optimal performance.
It is obvious that in addition to the external consumer needs of music users, there were - right from the beginning - "internal needs" within the company that had to address the potential difficulties in carrying out development and service activities with the appropriate priorities.
The large number of these requests - sometimes incidents - makes it necessary after a while to handle the type and criticality of tasks and activities in a meaningful way. The guiding principle of "focusing on value" examines the contribution of the management of an internal request or incident to value creation, thereby giving a kind of priority to those activities that help to ensure the continuous provision of the company's core business. An organization can only serve its customers and consumers if a similar service provider awareness develops in its internal operations, helping to facilitate joint cooperation and the continuity of the flow of values.
To implement all this, self-awareness was also necessary, to identify the working or less optimal activities and operating patterns. The “start where we are” principle provided assistance in this, as by closely examining the operation of the given areas and teams, loss-making or wasteful activities in the value streams became identifiable. Best practices and useful patterns and practices that facilitate the functioning of the organization could thus be consciously integrated into daily operations.
Because Spotify has built its operations on a strong agile mindset, it was no stranger to the principle of “feedback-driven incremental progress,” which places product development and service model design in the world of iterations and sprints.
The display of tasks and a quick overview of their statuses was made available to agile teams in the form of Kanban boards, based on the principle of "facilitating collaboration and visualization". This made not only the display, but also the display of load and resource capacities clearly visible by applying the WIP (work-in-progress) concept known from DevOps.
The visibility and transparency of tasks and the work of different teams provides many ideas and is an important addition to the principles of "all-encompassing thinking and working", "striving for simplicity and practicality", and "optimization and automation".
The key to Spotify's future success may be the realization that it carries out its activities along appropriate principles, yet in a regulated manner, but not slavishly subordinating itself to individual frameworks, thereby ensuring a creative and developmental culture and work methods that everyone can follow - where both the consumer and the employee are satisfied by the same organization.