Spotify Creator Services
Brief
The creator mission at Spotify works to develop tools and services that support artists and label providing content for the platform. The first one I tackled was the analytics.spotify.com portal where labels can watch and ingest data from Spotify. The portal was from the beginning just more or less an API that you could fetch data from, but we wanted to take it to a place where it could also provide insights about your audience and their listening habits.
My Role
I joined the creator mission as a Quality Coach, embedding in teams and helping them become self-sufficient quality wise. I worked closely with the technical directors, developers and Agile Coaches depending on what problem was holding back which squad from becoming self sufficient.
Complication
During my time in the creator mission, Spotify was completing it’s Initial Public Offering (IPO), and this put the whole company under a lot of pressure and maybe the most pressure came from the labels that not only are big stakeholders in the product, but actually major shareholders as well. My role became focused on not only helping individual squads, but also managing releases and making the services were near free of any issues and defects.
Resolution
Spotify had a successful IPO and has a healthy YOY growth of about 30% in Q1 2020. The partnership with the worlds major labels remains strained but the services supporting those labels remain healthy, and not a factor whenever things turn sour between Spotify and the Labels on its platform.
