I recently spoke to a recruiter at Skyscanner, and he mentioned that they have also adopted a similar model to Spotify. He called the model "Squads and tribes".
I work for Skyscanner, and can confirm this. It's a very effective model for managing a business this size, and IMHO fosters innovation within the business. Very basic description of the model as it is at Skyscanner:
Tribes - High level products (hotels, flights, car hire)
Chapters - "Departments"; areas of expertise (data acquisition, front end)
Squads - Autonomous project units (New features, development of an existing feature)
Guilds - Informal interest groups (Linux, Python, agile development)
Everyone is in a Tribe and a Chapter relating to their "department", and area of expertise; Squads are formed to work on projects, then disbanded once the project is finished; anyone can join and participate in Guilds, which serve as interest/support groups for technologies/strategies/methodologies.
Edit: Corrected my brainfart. Thanks ssabev! Can't believe I did it twice...
That's a good question. I think about it as a way to distinguish from e.g. departments, projects etc and set the connotation that these are different things. If you use them to mean a 1:1 mapping to e.g. projects, then it falls apart. The terms aren't important per se.
In other words – you can't make a race horse by painting a pig brown.
Cool to hear our model is getting adopted. A big difference here is that chapters at Spotify aren't departments, they are usually fairly small (5-10 people), and that squads are long lived, rather than project focused.
Never worked at Spotify but they seem very innovative (and they already let me rock out for eight hours everyday), so hey, nothing to bad say on my end.
