Scaling

In 2012, Spotify released a video about their engineering culture. It showed autonomous “squads,” aligned into “tribes,” supported by “chapters” and “guilds.” It looked amazing. Teams working independently. No bureaucracy. Innovation everywhere. The video went viral. Suddenly, every company wanted squads and tribes. Management consultants sold “Spotify Model transformations.” Books were written. Certifications created. There was just one problem: Spotify doesn’t use the Spotify Model anymore. The model that everyone copied was a snapshot of one moment in Spotify’s history. A work in progress. An experiment. ...

In the early 1990s, British anthropologist Robin Dunbar made a curious observation while studying primates. He found a correlation between the size of a primate’s neocortex (the brain region handling social relationships) and the size of its social group. Chimps, with smaller neocortices, lived in groups of ~50. Gorillas: ~30. Humans, with the largest neocortices, should be able to maintain stable social relationships with about… 150 people. That’s it. Not 500. Not 1,000. 150. ...