Spotify utilizes a squads and tribes method, with a squad being a fundamental unit containing all the skills needed to design, develop, test, and release its work, and tribes are groups of squads. They also have chapters for specific roles, who are in charge of training and organizing all the UI designers, for example. “Tribes group squads for coordination. Chapters group specialists for competence. Guilds group enthusiasts for knowledge sharing.” So for Spotify, while higher up teams decide what to work on, the squads work on the specific details of how the feature is built, and the PM sits in that Squad and has a decent amount of authority to decide where to go from there, but they don’t usually manage people. This is a contrast to AirBnb, where the CEO/an executive team makes the majority of the decisions, and they don’t have PMs and instead have Product Marketing Managers, which sit alongside designers, but PMs don’t have that much authority and must work alongside design and be able to pitch the entire idea of it. The third company is Zappos. Zappos is focused around different Circles for specific tasks, and they don’t have a formal PM role. Instead, members take on different roles in different Circles and don’t really have authority over each other, and instead have accountability towards their roles. But it didn’t become fully anarchy, rather the hierarchy was replaced with a lot of rules and another structured, but nontraditional model. I feel like all three models have their upsides and downsides, but I feel like for a smaller company, the Spotify model would work (it’s actually not used by Spotify anymore I think), and for a larger company it would be the AirBnb model. The Zappos model could also work for a small company but it feels very messy to me.
