How Spotify Makes Decisions Internally

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Spotify believes in a different approach to decision making from the traditional Silicon Valley mantra of 'move fast and break things'. They emphasize the importance of a socratic debate and reasoning through problems with a diverse group of intelligent individuals. They use multiple frameworks and debate extensively to arrive at the right decisions. Talking is considered cheap, so they engage in a lot of it to ensure they make informed choices. They believe that AB testing is not as cheap as perceived and can be incredibly expensive.

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

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Alex Heath's Tweet

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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.