[SaturnMoth]

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...

[benaston]

I suppose the difficult thing to gauge is whether using these cool-sounding names has any effect.

[marcusf]

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.

[marcusf]

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.

[ssabev]

Just a minor correction :)

Guilds - Informal interest groups (Linux, Python, agile development)