Spotify organizes their product teams by a term called the “Spotify Model”, which focuses on organizing around their work rather than specific practices. Within this model there are multiple levels of organization. On the base level are squads which are cross-functional, autonomous teams and are usually made of 6-12 people. Every squad focuses on one feature area, has a mission to guide the work they do, has an agile coach, and a product owner. Each squad chooses which agile method they want to use. Multiple squads collaborate on a feature area to form a tribe and are also organized by a term called Guilds. There are additionally other means of organization called Chapters, Trios, and Alliances. Spotify hires product managers that function in a traditional product manager sense.
For Airbnb, when the pandemic hit in 2019, they made major restructuring of their teams, moving from various divisions to one functional organization. They got rid of the traditional Product Management function and rather combined it with product marketing. Additionally, design is very central to airbnb when it comes to the development of their product. For Airbnb their design teams are made up of 4 areas: Experience, Production, Insights, and Content Strategy. And the ratio of Experience people to Production designers is 10:1.
However, Zappos uses a Holacratic structure which eliminates job titles and traditional management and instead uses self-managed teams. There are about 1500 employees and they function within a triangle of accountability with these self-managed teams and whoever is relevant to a needed decision. As a result of this, there is no traditional Product Management role.
I would choose Spotify’s structure because I feel that the lines of grouping roles are clearly defined and are heavily organized by focus area, optimizing feature output.
Sources:
https://www.atlassian.com/agile/agile-at-scale/spotify
https://medium.com/found-ation/agile-team-organization-a-deep-dive-on-the-spotify-model-f5b32dfc37dd
https://medium.com/@elishaong/designing-design-teams-23eb85b66085
https://www.figma.com/blog/config-brian-chesky-airbnb
Zappos Organizational Structure Analysis
