Recently a client told me that they were adopting the Spotify Model. Which sounded great at first. Spotify has published some great articles and videos about how they have grown and transformed their organization to be agile. Then it occurred to me that what he was saying was completely wrong.
The year was 2012 and operating a critical service at Netflix was laborious. Deployments felt like walking through wet sand. Canarying was devolving into verifying endurance (“nothing broke after one week of canarying, let’s push it”) rather than correct functionality. Researching issues felt like bouncing a rubber ball between teams, hard to catch the root cause and harder yet to stop from bouncing between one another. All of these were signs that changes were needed.