My mission is to improve the world of work, to empower people and teams, to create awesome organizations and products customers love

JOAKIM SUNDÉN

Consultant, keynote speaker, teacher, author
Lean-Agile organizations, leadership, coaching

Join my course this spring (remote or in Stockholm)

As more and more people become intrigued by the inner workings of the best tech-powered companies, the term “Product Model” has emerged to describe the common principles and practices shared by companies such as Amazon, Apple, Google, Netflix, and Spotify. Companies that understand the necessity of creating an environment where empowered product teams can exercise their creativity, discovering and delivering innovative solutions that not only customers love, but also drive business success.

This course aims to explain what those principles and practices are and how you can apply them in your organization to create a similar environment. The course makes heavy use of examples and cases from these and other companies. Many of the examples are based on my firsthand experience from having been directly involved in co-creating “the Spotify Model”, Spotify’s version of a Product Model, during the six years the company grew from 10 to 200+ teams. The course also covers Marty Cagan’s and SVPG’s definition of a Product Model (or Product Operating Model) and partly uses it as a structure to introduce specific principles, practices, and examples.

I’m running a remote version of the course April 15-17 and an in-person version in Stockholm May 30-31 – enter joakimsunden.com in comments to receive a 10% discount. Do you want me to run the course in-house exclusively for your organization? Contact me for more details. 

My Mission

My mission is to improve the world of work, to empower people and teams, to create awesome organizations. Work is a big and important part of most people’s lives and it can have an amazing impact for personal growth, as well as create value and happiness for ourselves and others.

Unfortunately many organizations fail to create the conditions for this to happen, instead creating a path to disengagement and unhappiness. To me, improving the world of work means developing organizations where people are empowered and encouraged to be awesome, leveraging the creativity and innovation in all of us to create products the customers love, and ultimately a better world for all of us. My personal contribution is often helping leaders to improve their organizations, to create the necessary conditions for empowering teams and people; removing obstacles to engagement, collaboration and innovation. 

ABOUT ME

JOAKIM SUNDÉN

Helping people and organizations to be awesome

I’m a consultant with Crisp, a small Swedish consultancy with world-renowned Agile experts who help develop sustainable organizations. From 2011 to 2017 I worked as an Agile Coach at Spotify where I was part of a group of people working together with the CTO to develop a new approach to Agile at scale, aka “The Spotify Model” with Tribes, Squads, Chapters and Guilds.

Keynote Speaker

I’ve been invited to speak at conferences for more than 15 years and I really enjoy sharing what I’ve learned during my 20 years in the industry. I would love to get a chance to inspire the audience at your next event.

Consulting

I help make people and organizations awesome, typically working with leadership teams to navigate the challenges of moving towards an Agile network organization of empowered product teams, whether it’s scaling your growing start-up or improving your already successful organization to stay competitive. I’m not attached to any particular framework but besides being one of the people developing Spotify’s early approach with Tribes, Chapters and Squads, I’m also a SAFe Program Consultant and a Certified Less Practitioner.

Teaching

Teaching is an important part of my consulting work but I also offer stand alone classes, public and in-house, on topics such as Agile at Scale Inspired by Spotify, Agile/Servant/Intent-Based Leadership, Agile Strategy with OKRs, and Leading SAFe.

Speaking

I’ve been privileged to have been invited to conferences to share my experiences all over the world for the last decade and it’s something I still enjoy doing. I always try to mix inspiration and concrete practical advice delivered with humor and well crafted slides. Drawing on my experience from six years at Spotify, where I was part of developing a new approach to agile at scale, this talk on how to enable and support autonomy in an agile network organization is one of my most popular talks.

Author

Read our book: Kanban In Action, now out in a new printing

“No mucking around … gets to the heart of kanban from the first page. A must-read!”
–Craig Smith, Unbound DNA

Solution-focused goal driven improvements

By exploring big audacious goals we focus on what we want, not on what we don’t want, which tends to encourage challenge rather than minor tweaking. Instead of the typical “whack-a-mole” approach to deal with known problem after they have occured this approach provides you with goals for continuous improvement. It’s also a lot more energizing!

Speaker

Consultant

Teacher

Leadership

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The Product Model at Spotify

Joakim’s Note: Spotify is an exceptional company, the best I’ve ever worked for. When I left the company after more than six years, I wanted to help other companies become more like Spotify. However, I didn’t believe companies could merely copy the organizational structures of

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Ivar Jacobson (IJI) and Joakim Sundén are delighted to announce a partnership to describe the “Spotify Model” to help people better understand what it is, and using Essence as an enabler, evolve the industries understanding of how it can be of value. The collaboration to “Essentialize” (render using

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