Bringing Podcasts to Spotify
Podcasts on Spotify / 2018 - 2020
Role: Product Design Lead, Design Manager
During my last two years at Spotify, I was managing and leading the design team in Stockholm and London to bring podcasts to Spotify. As a lead designer and manager, I am responsible for the end-to-end podcast experience on Spotify. I also help grow the team; set up ways-of-working; and, together with tech and product, define the strategy for the podcast product.
🚩 For this case study, I am focusing on my role as a Design Lead and Manager — where within the last 2 years, we have worked on multiple projects, efforts and products to support Spotify’s efforts around podcasts. For confidentiality reasons, what I can show here is limited to what we have announced publicly.
The Design Challenge
In 2018, we set out to evolve Spotify from the music app that people already know and love
The scope of my role
🎯 Strategy & Business
👩🏻💻 Design & Research
👯♂️ People & Team
Strategy & Business
As the first designer to work on this, I worked every closely with the Business, Tech and Product leadership to define the design vision and strategy of the podcast experience on Spotify.
What exactly did I do?
Visualise and communicate the strategy internally
Design vision for our Podcasts on Spotify
Pitch Spotify as a podcast platform of choice to big (The Obamas, Amy Schumer, Joe Rogan) and small podcast creators
Help with the integration of our big acquisitions (Gimlet, Anchor and Parcast)
Work with product and engineering teams to define how we want to approach and break down the vision into near term goals
🚩Working on a high stakes project meant working with a lot of stakeholders. Heading up all the Design for Podcasts meant that I had to constantly present and demo at All-Hands to get people excited about podcasts, inform our stakeholders about the changes coming Spotify and tell the Podcast story across the company. I was also working with our business teams on our big acquisitions like the Spotify & Anchor integration, for example.
Design & Research
As the design lead for Podcast, myself [along with the rest of my team] are accountable for the hypothesis and design solution. This includes:
Defining the Goals, Opportunities and Problems
Defining hypothesis and solution
Working with User Research & Data Science to understand our users and validate solutions (through quantitative and qualitative testing)
Working with product and engineering to execute the solution we want to go for
🚩 Collaborating with research, business, product and tech teams. As a design lead, I spent a lot of time getting to know our users. I organised design sprints, brainstorming, user journey sessions with the design, researchers, product and tech teams. I also lead the our effort to create Spotify’s first Podcast Personas project — something entirely new in a place that was primarily all about music.
🚩 Building on top of Spotify’s design system. Because Podcast was new to Spotify, we had to create new components to help us bring podcasts to life. For example, podcast card components needed to covey that each podcast has multiple episodes, most podcasts also had long titles and had multiple creators — the design system them did not account for all of these podcast characteristics.
🚩 Introducing Podcasts to Spotify took a lot of time and design iteration. Because there were only 2 of us in the beginning, I took on a more IC role. I was working with Daniel to find the right and more intuitive design to bring podcasts to life. That meant sketching, prototyping, testing and implementing solutions constantly.
🚩 Image above: this is the most recent launch where we completely restructured the IA of Spotify to give Podcast an equal footing to Music. Read more → Spotify’s ‘Your Library’ Refresh: What You Need to Know (Article)
🚩 Left: Organising and conducting design sprints / Top right: Facilitating Design critics / Bottom Right: Hiring the team
People and Team
I directly managed a team of 3 designers [and 1 writer] across London and Stockholm. I also lead the work of all the designers working on Podcasts. This includes:
Mentoring and coaching designers in the team
Providing design direction and feedback to the work
Developing and growing each designer in the team
Hiring and allocating headcount for the different needs of
What has happened since?
💪 Spotify became the number 1 podcast app in less than two years
💪 Exclusive podcasts with The Obamas, Joe Rogan, and many more
💪 From 1 to 5 designers across 🇸🇪Stockholm and 🇬🇧London
💪 Acquisition of Gimlet, Parcast & Anchor 💪 Spotify is more than just music