Marcin Floryan

🇺🇦❤️, 🌍 🇪🇺🇸🇪🇵🇱🏳️‍🌈

👦🏻 Hi, I'm Marcin and I'm always learning, and unlearning. Primarily about software engineering, psychological safety, diversity & inclusion, leadership, complexity and organisational design. My pronoun.is/he.

"A ship in a harbour is safe, but that is not what ships are built for." - this quote attributed to John A. Shedd, and later also used by Grace Hopper, characterises well my approach to life. I step into my days with alacrity.

👨‍💻 Since 2015 I worked at Spotify in Stockholm. As a Director of Engineering since 2017 I supported engineering teams building Spotify core playback technologies. Since mid-2021 I worked as Technology Operations Lead across a 1000+ organisation we call the Experience Mission, using data and insights to understand and improve organisational performance.
Since Jan 2023 I worked as a Director of Technology and Product supporting teams building content delivery and playback technologies.

Now it is time for new adventures. Stay tuned.

Public Speaking

I really enjoy public speaking and have gotten a lot of positive feedback for my presentations. Over the years I have covered a lot of topics that tended to be related to personal growth, engineering practices, management and leadership. One of my favourite subjects for a while was explaining to folks that "There is no Spotify model". These days I tend focus, broadly speaking, on:

Psychological Safety
Complexity
Leadership
Culture
Organisational Design
Distributed Work

I gladly present talks at universities, internal company events and conferences. Please reach out if you think I could join your event.

Upcoming talks

27 - 28 March 205, Warsaw 🇵🇱

IDC CIO Summit
Discussion Panel in Polish: "Zmiana paradygmatu przywództwa w dobie AI"

7 May 2025, Modena 🇮🇹

Innovation Roundtable Workshop: Culture & Leadership for Innovation & Digital Transformation
The Five Pillars of Leadership for Amplifying Agility and Learning: Creating Patterns for a New Reality, Building on Psychological Safety

2 - 5 June 2025, Brugg - Windisch 🇨🇭

XP 2025

Talk - Beyond the Buzz: Evolving Spotify to Deliver Valuable Software Products
Workshop - Influence and Be Influenced: the Leadership Balance - with Andrea Provaglio

Research

📃 Together with Darja Šmite, Nils Brede Moe and Georgiana Levinta I co-wrote "Spotify Guilds: How to Succeed With Knowledge Sharing in Large-Scale Agile Organizations" paper, published in IEEE Software. This work was recognised with the 2019 Best Paper Award for IEEE Software.

Smite, Darja, Nils Brede Moe, Georgiana Levinta, and Marcin Floryan. "Spotify guilds: how to succeed with knowledge sharing in large-scale agile organizations." IEEE Software 36, no. 2 (2019): 51-57.

In 2023 a similar collaboration resulted in a paper about "Decentralized decision-making and scaled autonomy at Spotify" published in Journal of Systems and Software

Šmite, Darja, Nils Brede Moe, Marcin Floryan, Javier Gonzalez-Huerta, Michael Dorner, and Aivars Sablis. "Decentralized decision-making and scaled autonomy at Spotify." Journal of Systems and Software 200 (2023): 111649.

Teaching

👨‍🏫 Between 2021 and 2025 I ran a class on "Building autonomous organisations" as part of the Agile Leadership post-graudate program targetted at senior leaders at SWPS University. The majority of the class is focused on building environment of psychological safety as the foundation of team autonomy and trust.

In 2023 I run a module on "Organizational Design - company scaling (from start-up to corporation)" as part of the IT MBA program at Cracov University of Economics.

FOSS

I support and contribute to free and open-source projects. I generally prefer free licenses for my work. Some of the projects I worked on are: Inkscape, openSuse, Wikipedia, OpenStreetMap, Poedit.