Squad, Tribes and Guilds – What I learned about scaling agile while working at a Leading Fashion Retailer.

 Adopting agile for a small startup itself is a challenge and scaling agile if the startup grows or adopting agile for large organizations is a mammoth task.
While work at the Leading Fashion Retailer I came across a successful model of adopting agile at large scale. They adopted model of Squad, Tribes and Guilds widely known as  Spotify model of agile scaling as this was first implemented at Spotify but later adopted and tweaked at many organizations.

Squad 

 The most atomic unit of our product team is the squad — a cross-functional, autonomous team of eight to twelve. Squad feels like a mini startup and somehow like a Scrum team. Squad are self-organizing and self-sufficient teams and decide their own way of working which works best for them. Some squads using Kanban, some use Scrum and many mix of both.

Each Squad focus on one business area and develop and maintain products around that business functionality such as one Squad focusing on On-boarding of Regional partners & franchise and Other on taking orders and providing fulfillment to Franchise .
The location of the squad doesn’t matter — we had squads with people from four different remote locations, while others work entirely in one office. Instead of requiring them to be in one place, we used tools like Google Hangouts, Lync, Video Conference to keep lines of communication open between team members.
Product owner is responsible for answering what need to be done (backlog grooming and prioritization) and team decides how it need to be done.
There are some foundational squads (DevOps, Platform, Ops etc.) whose focus is to work on common tools and infrastructure with a goal of making other squads move quickly and efficiently.

Tribe

Each tribe has a particular goal which is closely tied to overall company’s goal and contains a number of squads that work with that goal in mind. They works as an incubator for the startups. Tribe leader is responsible for the habitat of the Tribe.

The main reason of having tribes is as the number of squads grows, scaling squads without any sort of common goals to rally around becomes difficult.

Tribe usually share the location, though not all the members co-located (we had squad members in North America, South America and India but those tribesmen usually at same office space within those locations) and provides an atmosphere for informal meet up using co-location as well as technology.

Tribes have meet ups on a regular basis, an informal get-together to showcase the rest of the tribe  what they are working on, what they have delivered and what others can learn from what they are currently doing.

Guild

There is a downside to everything, and the potential downside to full autonomy is a loss of economies of scale. The UI developer in squad Alpha may be struggling with a problem that the UI developer in squad Beta already solved. If all UI developer could get together, across squads and tribes, they could share knowledge and best practices and create tools to benefit of all squads.

A Guild is a more organic and wide-reaching “community of interest”, a group of people that want to share knowledge, tools, code, and practices. Guilds provide a forum for people passionate about a certain aspect of their work to get together and discuss new developments in the field and share ideas with each other.