With so many different components to take into consideration, building awesome products can sometimes be challenging. How has Spotify tackled this problem? And what is their recipe for a streamlined product development process? Senior Product Manager at Spotify shared all the dirty secrets and explained in more detail the role of a product manager.
Senior Product Manager at Spotify
Miles Lennon has been developing software products at early and growth-stage companies for about ten years. He is currently a Senior Product Manager at Spotify, where he focuses on developing tools for artists to grow their careers.
Previously, he led Spotify’s social product area; a small product group focused on connecting friends, tastemakers and artists around music. Before that, he led product development for GameGround and Tracked.com, both of which were early-stage, VC-backed startups in the NYC area.
Product Development Process
Companies treat the role of product management differently. Miles shared how they articulate the product development process at Spotify. He gave a high-level overview of the whole process and explained in detail the role of a Product Manager.
Bullet Points:
- Who are Spotify’s customers?
- Artists, labels, consumers, creators/the industry, advertisers and Spotify developers.
- When doing product at Spotify, you could be servicing entirely different customers depending on what space you’re in and the products you’re building can be completely different.
- What does Spotify consider as its products?
- Features, content sets, revenue products, ads, subscription business, artist products, partner products, platforms and frameworks.
- Product lifecycle: “Think it, build it, ship it, tweak it.”
- Think it: Is the benefit worth the cost of doing it? Keeping the costs low when doing product discovery and research.
- Build it: Prototypes are done and tested. Quality code and quality design.
- Ship it: MVP is done and relayed to a small percentage of the users. Rollout marketing and PR dashboards.
- Tweak it: Optimization and cost reduction.
- Discovering new opportunities:
- Putting together the right team with the right tools depending on the problem you’re trying to solve.
- Spotify culture: “We believe in shared understanding and that ideas can come from anywhere.”
- Tools
- Data.
- User research.
- Design.
- Sprints.
- A/B testing.
- What Spotify expects of Product Managers:
- Learning.
- Relating.
- Choosing the opportunity.
- Framing.
- Pathing.
- Tech and design accountability at Spotify
- Technical delivery against commitments (deadlines and milestones).
- Technical quality, scalability, stability, etc.
- UX which meets strategic goals and product requirements/hypotheses.
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