Spotify’s Internal Structure: Three Horizontal Layers

54sec Snip

00:00

Play full episode

Summary

Comments

Transcript

Episode notes

Spotify has a three-layered horizontal structure in its organization. The first layer is the platform layer, which encompasses the Spotify technology platform. The second layer is the experience layer, known as the Spotify Experience Layer, which includes all the applications and surfaces used by users, such as mobile apps, cars, and desktop. The third layer is the personalization layer, responsible for all aspects of personalization, including recommending songs, podcasts, or audiobooks for individual users. These three layers act as a synchronization function, ensuring that everything goes through them before reaching the end user. This structure may slow down processes, but it allows the organization to handle complexity and ensures that all vertical businesses, such as the podcast, music, and audiobook business, have to go through these synchronization functions before shipping anything to the user.

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.