Spotify Ad Products
Brief
My second job in the US was working for a Swedish company in New York, Spotify. It was a mind blowing opportunity getting to work on a service that I use every single day. My role was to help the revenue mission improve their QA processes as they released new ad products to encourage more companies to advertise on the platform.
My Role
My role started out as a simple Sr. QA Analyst role, testing whatever features were being developed, but it quickly evolved into a Technical Owner role where I firstly helped the team do their testing themselves while improving quality, and secondly helped move the different projects along to completion, making sure all requirements were met on all platforms.
Complication
The best thing about Spotify is how it’s set up to encourage small teams to quickly push new features into the app themselves and be free from micro-management. This also was the biggest challenge for the ad products mission of the company. Since ad products are implemented horizontally through the app, they have many, many more touch points than other features. One particularly harrowing episode was then we were rolling out an ad banner to be on top of different user playlists. Unknown to us, and the playlist teams we had been communicating with, was that another team was rolling out a colliding experience for playlists. This resulted in the app crashing on all platforms for 1% of users (hundreds of thousands) whenever they opened a playlist. Me and the team learned from this though and the accident was not repeated. It was a unique learning opportunity that I will be pulling from the rest of my career.
Resolution
The Spotify Revenue business is thriving even after coming under intense scrutiny when the company IPO’d. Everyone wants to know how Spotify makes money of their free users, not scaring them off, and at the same time encouraging them to pay for premium. I was so successful setting up the revenue mission for success that I got the opportunity to do it all over again for the Creator mission supporting artists and labels.
