Creating High-Performing Teams at Spotify
In a scaled agile world of practitioners with diverse software development experience, how should leaders and coaches support teams' continuous improvement and ensure they are using best practices in engineering, ways of working, and culture? This is the question Spotify agile coaches Catherine Fleres and Erin McManus asked themselves over the last year. They’ll recount an approach in engaging teams from the start, instead of imposing specifics from leadership. Input was gathered from teams and leaders about what principles and engineering practices they value in order to create an assessment for teams and visualizations to measure continuous improvement. You’ll leave this session with a couple of key takeaways: It’s important to get buy-in from tech leadership up front, and alignment on tech principles, areas of improvement, and best practices is best conducted from the team level upwards, not the other way around. Finally, you can use a tech principles self-assessment to measure continuous improvement of a team and an organization as a whole over time.
Catherine Fleres is an Agile Coach who has worked at Spotify since January 2017. She specializes in coaching teams and leaders to help them build better products faster, and create a safe environment conducive to value delivery. Catherine started her agile journey by working as a consultant for Cisco, then worked with several other companies across the US before landing at Spotify. In that time she obtained the CSM, CSPO, and CSP certifications, as well as getting the opportunity to conduct training classes for these same courses alongside Rick Regueira, CEC. She speaks at Agile Conferences across the US, including Agile 2017, Agile Coach Camp NYC, and Open Space Orlando, on topics like Scrum, Kanban, Leadership, and Spotify. Today, Catherine lives with her husband and corgi in Highlands, NJ.
Erin McManus is an enthusiastic, results-driven leader with extensive experience working in digital teams and managing the delivery of digital products. She is a passionate agile practitioner and has been lucky to have been surrounded by some very cluey agilists in her career in Melbourne, Australia and now here in the United States. She thrives in agile software delivery teams, having played many roles over the last decade from product manager, program manager, agile coach and now engineering manager. Her mission is to always be learning more about the practices of companies that consider themselves Agile, and how they’re evolving their thinking and practices on what it takes to be an agile company.