The Future of Technology Is Here, Right?

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When money was cheap, it made all the sense in the world to be very aggressive and grab as much opportunity as possible. That's not true anymore. Money and capital is very expensive. So sportiva has to change like everyone else. We need to focus in addition to just being a great product. Our biggest challenge is actually to make these different content types work inside single application.

Gustav Söderström has worked at Spotify for a long time; his first big project was leading the launch of its mobile app back in 2009. That makes him the perfect company leader to talk to about Spotify’s recent redesign, which introduces a visual, TikTok-like feed for discovering new content on the app’s homepage. As his boss CEO Daniel Ek put it last week, it’s “the biggest change Spotify has undergone since we introduced mobile.”

With the title of co-president and chief product and technology officer, Söderström is responsible for not only how Spotify looks and feels but also all the AI work happening behind the scenes to power its increasingly important recommendations. According to Söderström, it turns out that improving those recommendations is actually at the heart of the big redesign. “I think companies that don’t have an efficient user interface for a machine learning world are not going to be able to leverage machine learning,” he told Alex Heath on the newest episode of Decoder.

Links:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Napster

Spotify is laying off 6 percent of its global workforce, CEO announces

Spotify’s new design turns your music and podcasts into a TikTok feed

Alex Heath's Tweet

Functional versus Unit Organizations

Two-Pizza Teams

Transcript:

https://www.theverge.com/e/23402123

Credits:

Decoder is a production of The Verge and part of the Vox Media Podcast Network.

It was produced by Creighton DeSimone and Jackie McDermott and it was edited by Callie Wright.