7 main elements of Spotify's Tribe Engineering Model in 2025

Spotify tribe, squad, and chapter model is a people-focused Agile framework that prioritizes team autonomy while aligning with organizational goals. Spotify introduced it in 2012 as a way to address the challenges of scaling Agile practices across the company. Basically, it's all about breaking down organization silos and implementing cross-functional collaboration.

As a result, the company created the following elements in their model:

• Squads;

• Tribes;

• Chapters;

• Guilds;

• Trios;

• Alliances.

In some instances, it's also possible to separately indicate the role of a Chief Architect who guides the whole team's workflow. Spotify's flexibility has inspired many companies worldwide to adopt or adapt the model. Let's learn more about each component in the following sections.

Spotify's agile methodology starts with squads, created as mini-startups responsible for specific aspects of the company's product. As an example, Squad A works on improving music recommendation algorithms, and Squad B covers content-based filtering.

The key features of Spotify's squads are their autonomy, self-organization, and cross-functionality. All kinds of experts, like developers, engineers, designers, and others, focus on achieving a single goal and providing high-quality results in their areas of expertise.

The key characteristics of a typical squad include:

• A clear mission and permission to make all decisions within their domain;

• A combination of Agile practices like Scrum or Kanban with the freedom to adapt all methods;

• A Product Owner ensures the squad's efforts align with the broader company goals.

Basically, a squad in the Spotify agile model is the smallest element of the team. It can be seamlessly integrated into tribes, chapters, and guilds. We'll cover these in the following sections.

A tribe is a collection of squads that work on related areas of the product and share a common mission. Continuing our example, we can combine Squad A and Squad B into a tribe that works on providing a personalized user experience within the app. While each squad works on smaller elements, together they build up a larger mechanism that works efficiently when combining all their efforts.

It's also necessary to note that the Spotify tribe structure correlates with the "Dunbar number," which indicates people can't maintain more than 100 social relationships simultaneously. The 100-person limit ensures people know each other well and aren't limited by restrictive rules and tight management.

The key characteristics of a typical tribe include:

• Up to 100 people to maintain a manageable size;

• A Tribe Lead oversees the tribe to ensure squads work together toward their common goal;

• Tribes hold regular gatherings with tribe-wide retrospectives and demos for brainstorming.

If squads have around 6–12 people, then you can count that a tribe includes approximately 8–9 squads. According to the Spotify tribe and squad model, there can be 10+ tribes in the company. The company's official data indicated that there were 1,600+ engineers on their team.

Chapters are groups of experts within a tribe who share similar skills or job functions. These can be front-end developers, back-end developers, and UX designers. There are usually around 10–20 members in a single chapter, helping the company maintain technical standards with a consistent approach and promote professional growth.

The key characteristics of a typical chapter include:

• Chapter Leads, usually senior team members, mentor and support their chapter members;

• Regular chapter meetings are needed to share knowledge, discuss challenges, and align on best practices;

• Chapters ensure consistency in technical approaches across squads.

If tribes are a combination of squads, chapters are an amalgamation of their best experts who are the leaders across their teams. These can be team leads, strong middle and senior developers & designers. But there's still something bigger than this.

Guilds are informal communities of interest that transcend squad, tribe, and chapter limitations. They bring together experts passionate about specific topics like AI, DevOps, product design, and others. A guild usually has dozens or even hundreds of members.

Guild members collaborate by hosting workshops, sharing best practices, and contributing to open discussions on their topic of interest. The impact of guilds lies in stimulating innovation, cross-functional knowledge sharing, and continuous improvement.

The key characteristics of a typical guild include:

• Voluntary participation with the goal to promote enthusiasm and innovation;

• Guilds often host workshops, hackathons, and discussions to exchange ideas and explore new approaches;

• They are not tied to delivery schedules, allowing for creative exploration.

While participation in chapters is mandatory within the Agile chapters and guilds model, guilds allow anyone to join them for professional growth. Even the whole company can participate if interested.

A trio is a leadership collaboration typically composed of a Product Manager, an Agile Coach or Scrum Master, and an Engineering Lead. They're also known as TPD trios. This group ensures that the squad's product development fully aligns with technical, process, and business priorities.

The key characteristics of a typical trio include:

• The Product Manager focuses on the "why" and "what" of product development;

• The Agile Coach ensures smooth processes and team dynamics;

• The Engineering Lead oversees the "how" of implementation and technical decisions.

This is basically the upper chain of leadership within the squads and tribes model, ensuring there are three different views on the product's future growth. That's also a great way to create a winning B2B SaaS product strategy.

Alliances are collections of tribes working together towards larger company goals. They address the need for alignment across multiple tribes. This can involve 3+ tribes (300+ people) for better cooperation when working on similar and interconnected tasks.

The key characteristics of a typical alliance include:

• Led by senior leadership to meet strategic priorities;

• Regular syncs between tribes within the alliance manage dependencies and reduce bottlenecks.

While this is technically the final element of the Spotify tribe organization approach, there's still one more element that has been frequently mentioned in recent years.

The Chief Architect role ensures that the technical direction aligns with the company's goals. This person provides oversight and guidance to maintain a consistent architecture across squads and tribes. Basically, this expert overviews the approaches and technologies used in all systems. If you're interested in setting up a data-driven application infrastructure, we recommend reading our previous article.

The key characteristics of a typical chief architect include:

• Focuses on long-term technical vision and scalability;

• Collaborates with chapters, tribe leads, and engineering leads to enforce technical standards.

And with this, we've covered all 7 elements of Spotify's agile tribe model.

Spotify's tribe agile model is built on autonomy and trust, speeding up development and promoting personal growth. These are the general key benefits that companies encounter using this approach. However, let's take a closer look at the pros and cons of each element within the model.

Dworkz is your reliable development and UI/UX design agency in San Francisco, creating high-quality software solutions of any complexity. We'll help you get the best solutions in any industry by applying our own expertise combined with proven methodologies.

Contact us today to get a consultation and a detailed estimate for your project!

Spotify's tribe model can solve most problems encountered in a typical software development company, allowing experts to realize their full potential across all challenges. Although it's not the only working team structure, it has proven to be highly effective and brought us the world's largest music streaming service.