The new generation of software companies such as the American Google and Thoughtworks, the Australian Atlassian or the Swedish Spotify, have revolutionized the way new companies are designed today. These companies are driven by autonomous agile teams and self-motivated engineers, who perform way above average, innovate and create value, further increasing company competitiveness. One of the key enablers of high performance is alternative organizational models with bottom-up governance in contrast to top-down management with hierarchies. However, when non-hierarchical agile environments scale, many challenges emerge, including coordination of multi-team work, agreement on development strategies, and shared code ownership. Which organizational structures take care of such decisions in the absence of hierarchies? In this article, we describe how Spotify cultivates guilds that help the company cultivate knowledge sharing, make collective decisions whenever alignment is required and manage agile development at scale. Further, we provide research-based advice on success criteria for guilds. New generation organizational structures: the Spotify caseSpotify is a software company providing music streaming service, launched in 2008. Within ten years, Spotify managed to continue growing and become one of the most innovative companies and an icon for the new generation agile organizations. Spotify ways of working and organizational structures are designed to promote innovation, collaboration and teamwork and enable bottom-up governance and autonomy 1 (see Figure 1):• Teams at Spotify are called squads, which should "feel like mini-startups", be self-organized and cross-functional, and ideally consist of 5-7 people. • Chapter is a group of engineers who have the same manager (Chapter Lead) and is focused on personal growth and skills development. Engineers in chapters share knowledge, learn from each other, and discuss common challenges.

When the value increases engagement, engagement increases the value.

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