ABSTRACT The COVID-19 pandemic has permanently altered workplace structures, making remote work a widespread practice. While many employees advocate for flexibility, many employers reconsider their attitude toward remote work and opt for structured return-to-office mandates. Media headlines repeatedly emphasize that the corporate world returns to full-time office work. This study examines how companies in software-intensive industry regulate work location, whether corporate policies have evolved in the last five years, and, if so, how, and why. We collected data on remote work regulation from corporate HR and management representatives from 68 companies that vary in size, location, and preferred work modality. Our findings reveal that although many companies prioritize office-oriented work (50%), most companies in our sample permit hybrid work (84%) and only four companies are returning to full-time office work. Remote work regulation does not reveal any particular new “best practice” as policies differ greatly; however, the single most popular arrangement was the three in-office days per week. More than half of the companies (53%) encourage or mandate office attendance centrally, with additional 18% having decentralized mandates. Over a quarter (28%) have changed regulations gradually increasing the mandatory office presence or implementing differentiated conditions. Our key recommendation for office-oriented companies is to consider trust-based recommendations as an alternative to centralized office presence mandates, while for companies oriented toward remote working, we warn about the points of no (or hard) return. Finally, the current state of policies is clearly not final, as companies continue to experiment and adjust their work regulation

As organizations increasingly integrate digital product development into their core business, structuring the development organization and workflows effectively becomes critical. Yet, there is no one recipe that tells executives how to design their organizations for success. We explore four approaches to organizing product development, drawing on Mintzberg’s organizational structures, and visualizes ways to bridge the gap between software developers and traditional organizational structures. We categorize four organizations along a spectrum from interface-based models to highly integrated product organizations, highlighting key differences in strategic decision-making, autonomy, and cross-functional collaboration. Our findings contribute to the ongoing discussion on large-scale agile transformations and provide practical guidance for navigating the shifts toward a product-centric operational models.

While modern software companies strive to increase team autonomy to enable them to successfully operate the piece of software they develop and deploy, efficient ways to orchestrate the work of multiple autonomous teams working in parallel are still poorly understood. In this paper, we report how team autonomy is maintained at Spotify at scale, based on team retrospectives, interviews with team managers and archival analysis of corporate databases and work procedures. In particular, we describe how managerial authority is decentralized through various workgroups with collective authority, what compromises are made to team autonomy to ensure alignment and which team-related factors can further hinder autonomy. Our findings show that scaled autonomy at Spotify does not mean anarchy, or unlimited permissiveness. Instead, squads are expected to take responsibility for their work and coordinate, communicate and align their actions with others, and comply with a few enabling constraints. Further, squads take many decisions independently without management control or due to collective efforts that bypass formal boundary structures. Mechanisms and strategies that enable self-organization at Spotify are related to effective sharing of the codebase, achieving alignment, networking and knowledge sharing, and are described to guide other companies in their efforts to scale autonomy.