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Learn how technical steering groups drive technical alignment while fostering ownership – balancing autonomy and collaboration to fuel speed, innovation, and impactful decision-making across teams.
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How can organizations balance the creative autonomy of their teams with the need for technical alignment and impactful collaboration? At Spotify R&D, we’ve tackled this challenge through our Technical Steering Groups (TSGs) – a lightweight but powerful mechanism for guiding technical strategy across autonomous teams.
In this talk, I’ll share how we’ve evolved Spotify’s Core Infrastructure TSG to act as a “virtual tech lead” for the department. We’ll explore:
- How we navigate the balance between autonomy of our teams and alignment within our organisation in a landscape that demands efficiency and lean processes.
- How we nurture ownership within teams that fuels our speed and innovation and at the same time become better at making the broad decisions fast.
- How we make this the space for our Senior and Staff+ engineers to drive broad impact
Through the challenges we’ve faced and the steps we’ve taken, I’ll share practical insights into what has worked, what hasn’t, and how we continue to adapt. From proactively addressing overlaps and gaps in our technology stack to ensuring alignment with studio-wide technical direction, TSGs have proven to be a critical tool for balancing autonomy and alignment.
Whether you’re a leader, an engineer, or part of a growing organization, this session will leave you with actionable insights and inspiration to shape your own approach – achieving alignment without sacrificing agility.
Key takeaways
- Balancing autonomy with alignment: Learn practical strategies to maintain team autonomy while fostering technical alignment across the organization, ensuring teams stay innovative without losing direction.
- Empowering senior engineers: Discover how to pair senior engineers up with staff+ engineers to shape technical strategy, drive cross-organizational impact, and engage in meaningful work beyond their immediate teams.
- Enabling faster, informed decisions: Gain insights into lightweight frameworks and processes that help organizations make hard technical decisions quickly while maintaining collaboration and efficiency.
