Throughout his 11-year tenure at Spotify, Gustav Söderström has held the title of VP of products, chief product officer – and now head of R&D. His current role sees him lead more than 1,500 people across product, design, data, technology and engineering, reporting directly to CEO Daniel Ek.
Having seen Spotify grow from startup to public company, as well as experience as an investor and adviser, Söderstrom knows a few things about successful product development.
How do you know you have a good idea for a product?
Söderström is a fan of using modelling tools to simplify messy problems and potential solutions. “If you can model a problem, then you can talk about the problem much more effectively,” he says.
He also uses frameworks such as Hamilton Helmer’s 7 Powers to help assess ideas, and works with the notion of Socratic debate to encourage his team to thoroughly probe one another’s proposals, battle-testing them on a theoretical level before moving forward. “I think it's remarkably effective versus actually writing code and shipping products, which is a very expensive endeavour,” he says.
When should you release a product into the wild?
There’s a delicate balance to be struck between releasing a bare-bones minimum viable product (MVP) and holding off until it’s absolutely perfect. Söderström says his personal instinct veers towards perfectionism, which can result in investing too much into a product and then feeling pressure to protect sunk costs. “But I have found that it's quite easy to misinterpret a good idea because of poor execution as well.”
Nowadays, he says, people are much less willing to download a new app – “so if you're going to ask for someone's attention, I don't know if the super-crappy MVP approach is going to work.” He suggests testing an MVP internally to start the feedback loop before going out to customers.
How do you make your product stand out?
With so many demands on people’s attention, figuring out how to reach a consumer audience is as important as building an amazing product. When Spotify recently turned its focus to podcasting, it decided not to make a separate app, even though that would have made for a better user experience. Instead, it integrated podcasts into its music app – ”which meant we got the podcast quote-unquote ‘app’ to the existing 200 million-plus users,” Söderström says.
For new startups that don’t have an existing user base, he suggests looking at partnerships: “You need to be strategic about distribution, not just product.”
This article was originally published by WIRED UK
