The Squad Model Failed

Everyone copied the Spotify model.

Squads. Tribes. Chapters. Guilds. The vocabulary spread through tech companies like a virus.

Here's what they didn't know.

Spotify itself moved away from it.

Anders Ivarsson, co-author of the famous whitepaper, later admitted it was "part ambition, part approximation." Spotify wasn't fully implementing it even when they published it.

What went wrong?

The model optimized for autonomy. But autonomy without coordination creates fragmentation. Teams duplicated efforts. Knowledge stayed siloed. Cross-team work became impossible.

Former Spotify agile coaches said the quiet part out loud: many teams had no real understanding of Agile principles. It was "not really agile; it was just not-waterfall."

Structure matters. But copying someone else's structure copies nothing.

The Spotify model worked for a specific culture at a specific size. When they grew, they evolved. Everyone else copied the snapshot and wondered why it broke.

This note explores Coordination Cost Scaling, one of four dynamics from The Momentum Engine. What works at one scale breaks at another. It also demonstrates Shadow Strategy: Spotify's execution revealed their actual practice. The whitepaper was espoused theory. What they actually did was the shadow strategy.