Marcin Floryan

🇺🇦❤️, 🌍 🇪🇺🇸🇪🇵🇱🏳️‍🌈

👦🏻 Hi, I'm Marcin. I'm always learning, and unlearning, about how people build great things together. Software engineering remains my foundation, but I'm equally drawn to the human systems around it: psychological safety, leadership, complexity, organisational design, diversity and inclusion. My pronouns are he/him.

👨‍💻 I help build organisations where purpose drives performance. I cultivate environments where people collaborate on complex challenges—fostering psychological safety, embracing diverse perspectives, and encouraging growth. I've spent over 25 years in software engineering and leadership, including nine years at Spotify in Stockholm leading large engineering and product organisations, building the technologies behind how hundreds of millions of users experience music and video. Most recently I joined Marshall Group as VP, Software.

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.

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

03 June 2026, Copenhagen 🇩🇰: Innovation Roundtable Workshop hosted by Maersk
Evolving Leadership for a New Reality: Amplifying Agility, Learning, and Human Connection in the Age of AI

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-graduate program targeted 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.