Lessons from scaling Spotify: The science of product, taking risky bets, and how AI is already impacting the future of music | Gustav Söderström (Co-President, CPO, and CTO at Spotify)

The internet sort of started with curation of the user curation. So you you you took something, some good, like people or books or music, and you digitize it and you put it online and then you asked users to curate it. And that was just 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. It 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 product. We had to rethink the user interface and the experience for recommendation first era. And so what what does that mean in the generative era? N no one really knows yet. 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 Gustav Sodterstrom. Gustav 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 Gustav 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 Gustav 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 being in your pants.

Enjoy this episode with Gustav Sutterstrom 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.

We already have this episode, so unlocking it is cheap and permanent: the full transcript, segment and word-level timestamps, and .txt, .srt, .vtt and word-level JSON downloads, as many times as you like, forever.

10 free credits is 10 episodes like this one a month. Episodes nobody has transcribed yet cost their length in hours, because we have to actually transcribe them.