Spotify is the best company to become or grow as a Product manager

Tomorrow, I will be at Spotify office to attend the “Spotify Machine Learning Day”. Before I get real impressions about Spotify people & culture, I would like to share with you why I think Spotify is the best company to become a Product manager. The same way that P&G was the best one for marketing or HP for tech management in the last century. After the event, I will also share my impressions about it. These are the 5 reasons why I believe Spotify is the best place to become a world class PM:

1º The kind of Business challenges

• Different kind of customers fulfill the different value propositions: Spotify faces B2C consumers, B2B advertisers, content providers as creators & Labels (and the rest of the industry) and Spotify developers (they defined it as an internal customer). The whole model is based on the inter dependency of the business levers and customers
• Different business models: Free vs Premium: They must acquire free users through different channels optimizing CAC & monetize them (finding advertisers mainly locals through traditional local sales forces) and move them to subscription model without forgetting about churn optimization.
  Furthermore, they face platform network effects (find customers and content to offer at the same time), and now ubiquity challenge (ability to capture and deliver no matter customer context)
• Overall business: They can’t be relaxed because their entire business is on stake every year. They provide songs owned mainly by 4 mayors with more levers in the negotiations. Every year they ask for price increases (per song played). Spotify’s power is the ability to reach millions of customers (they did it first outside the gold mine: USA) and to learn faster how to provide better experiences. Spotify assures that each PM embraces each business challenges and deliver aligned to them within their own responsibilities.

2º Awesome Product & features

It is not only the App, or the desktop client or the web player; They consider playlists as products as well (Content sets). That’s why Spotify have launched discover weekly and release radar. Those are products examples although 90% of the value is the content selected. One key learning here: “You need to adapt the product definition to your own case to offer the most to your customers”. Furthermore, Spotify considers products the way you search or explore on their universe. In fact, there are PM of Search or Discovery. If you want to understand better, look this video

Product challenges are also top-world ones:

• Subscription business: Upsell, onboarding, analytics, different value props
• Provide to the artists the place they deserve to show their portfolio.
• A partner product strategy: Integration with uber, waze, tinder, runkeeper etc..
• Platform & Products: Ways to help Spotify to do things.

3º Product life cycle

So far, we have seen what Spotify faces and what they build, but it is as important the way they do it. “Think it, Build it, Ship it, Tweak it” approach. Do you know what is Spotify’s competitive advantage? They learn faster. This is how they do what they do (you can watch it here)

• Think it:

Research: UX methodologies to understand the insights behind the problem

Problem validation: Is the problem defined, understood and analyzed?

Concept validation: Is the solution solving the problem?

Experimentation: Have we interact enough with customers (ideally in their own environment) around the problem?

There is a video how UX can work with Data and Data guys here

• Build it: you can read more about it here

MVP scoping: How far (or what is core) we need to go to validate our solution?

Architecture: What are the different parts of the system? How many integrations? How many new?

Quality code / design: Assure that you follow the code standards designed by the company

Test automation: To reduce the effort to put together the work of each one

• Ship it

Roll out: deployment with real fire (1% initial trials?)

Marketing / PR: How you make the users know about the new features

Dashboard & Monitoring: Need to measure, in order to improve and define success

• Tweak it: Improve the business KPI’s step by step, once that you launched and have started to learn

4º Organization

• Squads: “It’s a small cross-functional self-organized team with usually less than 8 people. They have end-to-end responsibilities and they work together toward long-term missions. On Squads, the key drive is autonomy” There a lot to learn about it here
• Believe in PM: Accountability is really important within the company. (you can read about here) Spotify top management share the challenges and every PM has to find the way to help to achieve these challenges.
• Empower Business, design and tech at the same level across the organization to fulfill customer expectations

5º Culture

We have been talking about culture during this whole post, but let me share with you something else regarding Product Manager Mindset:

• Learning mindset: You need to be eager to learn to become an expert in our domain. “I may not be there yet but I’m closer than I was yesterday”
• Relating mindset: How you need to deliver to help company to reach overall goals
• Filter mindset: Analysis time is over. Bias to action!! You need to choose the opportunity and define the potential impact for the company
• Framing Mindset: what is the opportunity? what are the constrains? and always define success to be able to track the performance.
• Pathing Mindset. Spotify embraces this: “The goal is the path” and they only ask to measure the delta to ensure overall value added.

Tomorrow I want to breath some of this just in their offices and at the same time learn about ML recommendations ;). So I will let you know if I discover something else, or I should modify some of this 5 reasons.