I Don't Think It's a Two Way Door

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The notion that we need to get better at discovery and you should discover audio by actually hearing the audio instead of looking at pictures and reading text is a very high conviction around. So I don't think it's a two way door for anyone to sort of stay out of innovating for machine learning world. But then is it, like I said, the shortcut section on top is exactly the same that we have. And we can choose to have more of those items. If we see that people feel like, no, now it's too hard to get my favorite song, just increased the amount of shortcuts until it's easier than ever.

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.