A former Spotify agile coach admitted they focused too much on autonomy, which created "really dumb problems." Teams lacked standard tooling like a common version control system, proving that autonomy requires strategic guardrails and alignment to be effective at scale.
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When one team (e.g., engineering) adopts agile methods while interdependent teams (e.g., finance) do not, it creates system-wide dysfunction. This "arrhythmia" highlights the need for a holistic view of transformation, ensuring all parts of the organization can keep pace.
In an attempt to scale autonomous coding, Cursor discovered that giving multiple AI agents equal status without hierarchy led to failure. The agents avoided difficult tasks, made only minor changes, and failed to take responsibility for major problems, causing the project to churn without meaningful progress.
Building a culture of 100% team empowerment is dangerous. Commercial realities mean top-down directives are inevitable. If the organization isn't culturally prepared for this, it will grind to a halt when that moment arrives, causing widespread dissatisfaction.
Effective delegation of decision-making authority is impossible without first ensuring leaders are deeply aligned on organizational objectives. When individuals are empowered to make choices but pull in different directions, the result is a quagmire, not progress. Alignment must precede autonomy.
At Spotify, when people moved teams, they often kept their original manager. This created a chaotic web of reporting lines, making it impossible to establish clear accountability, consistent performance management, or unified team direction, ultimately undermining the model.
Similar to technical debt, "narrative debt" accrues when teams celebrate speed and output while neglecting shared understanding. This gap registers as momentum, not risk, making the system fragile while metrics still look healthy.
Giving teams total freedom can be terrifying and counterproductive. Leaders must provide enough structure ('guardrails') to prevent chaos, but not so much that it kills creativity. This balance is the key to fostering productive autonomy.
The famed organizational design was merely an aspirational "wishlist" that Spotify never fully adopted. Companies copying it are chasing a fantasy primarily used for recruiting, not a proven operational model that the company itself ever ran on.
The "3 A's" framework offers a practical alternative to the pitfalls of unchecked autonomy seen at Spotify. True empowerment means ensuring teams have strategic guardrails (Alignment), clear responsibility for outcomes (Accountability), and the capability to succeed (Ability).
The primary obstacle to adopting a shared platform model is cultural resistance. Teams accustomed to controlling their full stack view shared platforms as a loss of autonomy and a forced dependency. Overcoming this requires building a culture of trust and shared goals, not just proving the technological superiority of the platform.
