Spotify, Airbnb, and Zappos’s product teams are organized differently, and these different structures demonstrate the various ways that companies can decide internally what gets built.
Spotify’s product teams are divided into squads and tribes. The squads are smaller groups, around 6-12 people, that sit within larger tribes of 40-150 people, which maintain alignment across multiple squads. Squads are cross-functional and have significant autonomy over how they decide to achieve their goals/missions and they focus on a feature area. The tribes have a tribe leader who coordinates across the squads. This structure enables communication and agile innovation.
Airbnb’s product teams can be described as functional with a strong design voice at the top. They have modular teams, where product managers are matched with engineers, designers, and data scientists, which enables them to approach business problems from all sides. Major product and design decisions are left more to centralized higher level leadership. An Airbnb PM wrote that there is no feeling of rank within each team.
Zappos’s product teams are a holacracy. This structure distributes authority and decision-making through self-organizing teams, and emphasizes roles over titles, with the goal to create a more dynamic and effective organization. The roles are organized into product circles to guide overall progress and focus. Holacracy can support employees into being independent and taking ownership, though it can cause confusion about responsibilities due to the lack of titles.
Of the three organizations, I would want to work at Spotify. The squads structure enables autonomy at the team level, which allows flexibility and different approaches to solving product problems, while still providing enough explicit structure to allow me to understand where I fit into the team as a new PM.
