The science of product, big bets, and how AI is impacting the future of music | Gustav Söderström

The internet sort of started with curation, often user curation. So you, you, you took something, some good, like people or books or music, and you digitized it and you put it online, and then you asked users to curate it. And that was Facebook, Spotify, and so forth. And then after a while, the world switched from curation to recommendation, where instead of people doing that work, you had algorithms. And that was a big change that required us and others to actually rethink the entire user experience, and, and sometimes the, the business model as well. And I think we're entering now is we're going from your curation to recommendation to generation. And I suspect it will be as big of a shift that you will eventually have to rethink your products. We have to rethink the user interface and the experience for recommendation first era. And so what, what does that mean in the generative era? No, no one really knows yet.

(instrumental music) Welcome to Lenny's Podcast, where I interview world-class product leaders and growth experts to learn from their hard-won experiences building and growing today's most successful products. Today my guest is Gustavs Soderstrom. Gustavs is a product legend, and he's now the co-president, chief product, and chief technology officer at Spotify, where he's responsible for Spotify's global product and technology strategy, and oversees the product, design, data, and engineering teams at the company. I've had Gustavs on my wish list of dream guests to have on this podcast since the day I launched the podcast. And I'm so happy we made it happen. In our conversation, we dig into what Gustavs has learned about taking big bets and what to do when they don't work out, how Spotify moved away from squads and how they structure their teams now, how AI is already impacting their product, and also the future of music generated by AI, also why all great products need to pull some kind of magic trick, how accurately Succession represents Swedish business culture, and his hilarious analogy of peeing in your pants. Enjoy this episode with Gustavs Soderstrom after a short word from our sponsors. This episode is brought to you by Microsoft Clarity, a free, easy-to-use tool that captures how real people are actually using your site. You can watch live session replays to discover where users are breezing through your flow and where they struggle. You can view instant heat maps to see what parts of your page users are engaging with, and what content they're ignoring. You can also pinpoint what's bothering your users with really cool frustration metrics like rage clicks, and dead clicks, and much more. If you listen to this podcast, you know how often we talk about the importance of knowing your users. And by seeing how users truly experience your product, you can identify product opportunities, conversion wins, and find big gaps between how you imagine people using your product and how they actually use it. Microsoft Clarity makes it all possible with a simple yet incredibly powerful set of features. You'll be blown away by how easy Clarity is to use. And it's completely free forever. You'll never run into traffic limits or be forced to upgrade to a paid version. It also works across both apps and websites. Stop guessing, get Clarity. Check out Clarity at clarity.microsoft.com. This episode is brought to you by Eppo. Eppo is a next generation A/B testing platform built by Airbnb alums for modern growth teams. Companies like DraftKings, Zapier, ClickUp, Twitch, and Cameo rely on Eppo to power their experiments. Wherever you work, running experiments is increasingly essential. But there are no commercial tools that integrate with a modern growth team stack. This leads to wasted time building internal tools, or trying to run your own experiments through a clunky marketing tool. When I was at Airbnb, one of the things that I loved most about working there was our experimentation platform, where I was able to slice and dice data by device types, country, user stage. Eppo does all that and more, delivering results quickly, avoiding annoying prolonged analytic cycles, and helping you easily get to the root cause of any issue you discover. Eppo lets you go beyond basic click-through metrics, and instead use your North Star metrics like activation, retention, subscription, and payments. Eppo supports tests on front end, on back end, email marketing, even machine learning claims. Check out Eppo at geteppo.com. That's geteppo.com and 10X your experiment velocity. (instrumental music) Gustavs, welcome to the podcast.