The book describes the success story of Spotify and how small groups of people in a startup can revolutionize a market
Other similar unicorns with a small, mission driven team have also been able to revolutionize an industry
The main idea of the book is based on describing how to build an engineering culture of trust and empowerment, and how trusting/empowered teams are more efficient and happier
Startups are from Mars while big corporations are from Venus
The problem with projects in traditional companies is that projects are usually delivered and finished while great products leverage multiple iterations to get it right. The learning is in the maintaining of the product. That’s why unicorns leverage squads (small group of diverse engineers) that have a mission and are in charge of maintaining what they build.
A squad is a self-sufficient small team of engineers. Squads have autonomy, empowerment and trust to achieve their missions
Some Squads also include two roles that are useful for the team self improvement (the product manager and the data scientist). The data scientist collects data to help make better decisions.
As teams scale up they tend to become less efficient. “What takes 1 software engineer 1 month, it takes 2 software engineers 2 months”
Instead of building a large monolithic application, spotify decided to build a decoupled architecture, where each team can work separately in a different feature at the same time
To scale efficiently, spotify created tribes, chapters and Guilds