Stealing from the best, lessons from three years at Spotify

Join us as we are excited that Kevin is here to enlighten us on the Spotify model and Agile.

I was privileged to be a senior leader in the product development team at Spotify from 2013 until 2016. I joined the company right after the adoption of the now well-known "Spotify Model." As a Tribe Lead and then Alliance Lead, I helped in the models' evolution as the company grew to over 800 developers across five offices on two continents.

My time at Spotify was instructive in many ways, and since leaving, I have adopted the lessons I learned as a CTO in multiple companies.

While the squads/chapters/tribes/guilds model as a method for scaling agile development is what people focus on, the ideas and values that inspired that model are valuable and applicable across a wide range of organizations.

I will share those ideas and values in this talk—their application at Spotify and how I have applied them in different organizations since.

Kevin Goldsmith Information:

Kevin Goldsmith serves as the Chief Technology Officer for Anaconda, Inc., provider of the world’s most popular data science platform with over 25 million users. In his role, he brings more than 29 years of experience in software development and engineering management to the team, where he oversees innovation for Anaconda’s current open-source and commercial offerings. Goldsmith also develops new solutions to bring data science practitioners together with innovators, vendors, and thought leaders in the industry.

Before joining Anaconda, he served as CTO of AI-powered identity management company Onfido. Other roles have included CTO at Avvo, vice president of engineering, consumer at Spotify, and nine years at Adobe Systems as a director of engineering. He has also held software engineering roles at Microsoft and IBM.

Goldsmith is also the founder and principal at Nimble Autonomy, LLC., where he consults with growing startups working to scale their technology and teams deliberately and thoughtfully and with established companies working to be more innovative and nimble in their product development practices.