Tag: engineering

Tips for Creating a Successful Hack Week

March 16, 2023

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Hack Week has become something of Spotify lore. The beloved Discover Weekly playlist originated as a Hack Week idea, as did the ability to exclude select playlists from your Taste Profile. Now Spotify employees across functions worldwide look forward to the annual week where they put their regular work aside and collaborate on ideas that combine their passions, creativity, and skills. But developing Hack Week into the massive event that thousands of Spotify employees participate in annually is a feat in itself. 

According to Sarah Gänsicke and Nanci Veitch, Spotify Project Managers for R&D Communities, Hack Week started out as a “hot potato” in the early days of the company. “Each year it had the same skeleton—a kick-off event, a week of hacking, a fair, and local People’s Choice awards, but no repeatable format from a project management perspective,” Sarah shared. As Spotify matured, its teams turned Hack Week into a full-scale experience with a dedicated internal website, Skill Exchange portal (itself a Hack Week project), a developed visual identity, and an internal communications campaign to generate excitement and spread knowledge. “What has been great about the intentional scaling and effort behind the program is that it’s created a space for Hack Week to exist all year round rather than just being an engineering event that happens somehow every year,” said Nanci. Hack Week has also expanded to include non-R&D employees and now has “a long legacy throughout the company.” 

The benefits of Hack Week—providing opportunities to collaborate outside of one’s everyday team, giving employees flexibility to improve upon the product, offering ways to stretch beyond comfort zones—are endless. Nanci and Sarah offered five thoughtful tips to teams and companies looking to host their own hack weeks. 

  1. Create dedicated program management and identity. Though our core event has mostly stayed the same throughout the years, having a process that’s driven by a schedule and a set of principles has allowed us to make improvements to our communications, reduce barriers to entry, and increase the ease of participation for a diverse group of participants. For example, we developed a Hack Hub where employees can find hack ideas, explanations on how to join a team, and examples for a great hack. We also have a dedicated visual identity for Hack Week, which has helped to inspire and attract non-R&D employees. 
  2. Be inclusive. It’s not just who gets involved, but how you’re opening the door to them. We’ve enabled employees worldwide to join Hack Week by holding a mostly virtual event that abides by our distributed first principles. This year, we have hackers representing most of our global offices. We’ve also found ways to ensure Hack Week is not just for engineers. Members across many disciplines now engage in Hack Week. We encourage this by spotlighting nontraditional hacks and roles like user researchers, product designers, and music team members so they can see available opportunities. Encouragingly, we’ve found that individuals who join Hack Week are over 50% more likely to do it again. 
  3. Make the themes innovative and inspiring. This year’s theme is “The Future Is . . .” and it builds on a base of big-picture ideas inspired by recommendations from Spotify leaders. We recommend connecting the Hack Week theme back to your company’s core identity and priorities, but it’s also important to make the theme broad enough to allow for creative interpretation. With a powerful theme, people believe they’re setting their own mission. “We want to set the stage for hacks that push boundaries,” Nanci and Sarah noted. 
  4. Step out of your comfort zone. Hack Week is short, leaving many projects left unfinished—and that’s part of the beauty of the week. Goal-setting during Hack Week takes many forms but doesn’t necessarily include completion of the product. Hackers are encouraged to embrace the Spotify value of playfulness and utilize the week to get out of their day-to-day roles. We also recommend connecting and working with individuals outside of one’s direct realm. This really allows Hack Week to be a tool for interpersonal connection as well as a meaningful professional experience. 
  5. Don’t be afraid to bring in outside perspectives. This goes for participants and coordinators. Hack Week is a collaboration between Spotify’s dedicated Hack Week team and Say It Good Studio, a branding and communications studio that created and built Spotify’s Hack Week hub. “We treat Hack Week internally as if it’s an external campaign, keeping track of click-through rates and the like,” explained Sarah. “Having an external partner helps us avoid our biases, maintain good communication, and ensure it’s a more accessible process for everyone in the organization.”

Over the years, we’ve also brought inspirational figures into Hack Week to help our teams get excited about hacking. Notable artists involved in our internal campaign challenged hackers to “make space” ahead of Hack Week 2021 and “make the planet cooler” during Hack Week 2022. 

Like any good project, there’s always room for improvement. “One challenge that we’re still working through is that it’s hard to follow hacks from Hack Week to reality,” Nanci explained. “We began methodically tracking Hack Week projects in 2022 to address this and now use our Skill Exchange as a library to keep a close eye on projects that continue into development.” 

As for what the future of Hack Week at Spotify holds—we’ll leave that to the hackers to determine.

VP of Technology and Platforms Tyson Singer Shares How Developers Can Solve Complexity With Backstage

February 16, 2023

As Spotify’s VP of Technology and Platforms, Tyson Singer keeps a watchful and anticipatory eye on the company’s tech infrastructure. He focuses most on ensuring that our platform is always evolving behind the scenes—while still working for our users. He also makes sure that we’re at the forefront of tech innovation through effective long-term investments in areas like open source and sustainability. No small feats. 

His team’s most recent success is commercializing Backstage, a developer portal that Spotify created internally and then open-sourced in 2020. “Open-source software is code that is designed to be publicly accessible—anyone can see, modify, and distribute it as they see fit,” Tyson explained to For the Record. “Opening up Backstage to the open-source community enabled external contributions that kept improving the tool, and the wide array of viewpoints made it an even more diverse platform for us and everyone using it.”

What does Backstage actually do? What is the problem it solves for enterprises? 

Backstage solves complexity—the kind of everyday complexity that can really bog engineers and their teams down, which then slows your whole organization down. Developers have access to more technologies than ever before, which comes with more responsibilities than ever before. Whether working at small or large companies, engineers use countless systems that all come with their own interfaces and ways of doing things. 

A Backstage developer portal puts everything in one place and is customized to whatever tools a company and individual developer team are using. So instead of switching between all these different tools and dashboards and systems, there’s just one front end for all of it — a single pane of glass. This unlocks speed, improved collaboration, or even just a smoother day. 

How did a company like Spotify come to create a tool for developers, and how has it evolved over time?

Years ago when Spotify was just starting to grow into the platform it is today, the software on the back end was becoming increasingly fragmented and complex. We needed to find a way to simplify the messy ecosystem and make it easier for developers to focus on what they do best: creating. It is central to our philosophy that happy developers make happy code.  

As I mentioned, we went on to open source it because it is fundamental to our entire platform, so we were incentivized to make the best product possible and make it the industry standard. It took off as an open-source tool and currently has over 700 adopters from companies like Netflix, Peloton, American Airlines, and more. 

In December, we took our first step into commercial software by selling a bundle of plugins to enhance the open-source version of Backstage. If you think of Backstage like your phone, then the plugins are like the apps—they are what make your phone more valuable and useful. We’re really excited about generating revenue that allows us to continue to invest in and support our open-source work. 

What are some innovative strides Spotify is making in technology and how does that align with our overall mission?

Spotify is obviously best known as the world’s largest audio-streaming platform, but that last part is often overlooked: platform. Our tech platform powers over 500 million creators with cutting-edge technology at a scale that is constantly growing. That means our engineers are building more, faster, while also making sure our platform continues to run smoothly. A core part of our company mission is to unlock human potential and creativity. Developers are creators—some of the most prolific creators, given that every company is now a technology company, and we’re really excited about the technologies we are building that empower them to do their best work. We plan to share more of those technologies so developers outside of Spotify can achieve the same experience. 

And finally, what’s on your “recently played”?

Mostly I listen to podcasts. One of my long-time favorites is Invest Like the Best with Patrick O’Shaughnessy. I’m not a professional investor, but his guests often have very forward-looking and insightful views on technology and business. And I love his closing question, “What’s the kindest thing anyone has done for you?” as it reminds us and these successful folks that kindness and luck are a big part of success.  

Music-wise, my “recently played” is completely unpredictable, even to me. I thought when I checked I’d see Soundgarden, The Beatles, or Queen show up, but it was actually Norah Jones, Buena Vista Social Club, and Gipsy Kings. That’s the beauty of Spotify for me, there’s always great recommendations for every mood.  

Build the best developer portal possible with Backstage.

Meredith Humphrey and Her Team’s Spotify Hack Week Project Imagines a Green Tour Planner for Artists

March 22, 2022

Earlier this month, more than 2,400 Spotify employees took part in our annual Hack Week. For five days, employees from across the business stepped away from their regular work and focused their energies on projects or initiatives they’re passionate about. And just as last year’s Hack Week encouraged Spotifiers to “make space,” this year’s also served as a larger call to action, challenging individuals to think critically about ways of better using our platform to “make the planet cooler.” What’s more, Hack Week 2022 encouraged a greater number of employees outside of engineering to hack than ever before.

Though Hack Week was again held virtually, employees came together on Slack, Google Hangouts, real-time note-taking, and our virtual Hack Week platform to push each other on ideas related to amplifying the company’s climate action, sustaining justice for people and the planet using our platform, helping Spotify reach net-zero emissions, and more. Each individual chose a project that personally excited them, though these are not projects that Spotify is currently pursuing—or that even relate back to each person’s work. This year, the For the Record team spoke to five hackers who worked across these themes on four climate-related projects. 

 

Meredith Humphrey, a Senior Project Manager on the Studios Program Management Team,  participates annually in Hack Week, carving out a day or two to work on something unrelated to her day job. But this year’s theme inspired her to engage for the full five days. She worked together with a large team to create a tour CO2 calculator, an idea that could help musicians and podcasters going on tour calculate the environmental footprint of their travels. The goal? According to Meredith: “To help them collect that data really easily and enable them to offset it if they want to.” 

 

 

How did the Green Tour Planner come to be?

I’ve been thinking about carbon emissions a lot in my personal life. I live in Sweden, but I’m from the U.S., so I take a lot of long-distance flights while also looking to reduce my footprint. In October, I saw tour dates for one of my favorite artists pop up on my Instagram, and I had two thoughts simultaneously: one was, “I’m totally going to this tour,” and the other was, “This is so many flights.” So I was wondering whether bands know their own footprint and if they’re trying to reduce it? Then I wondered how Spotify could help them get that data because it’s really hard to find. I want creators to feel empowered, know their data, and be able to take action. 

So when the theme for Hack Week was announced, I created a team. As it so happened, there was another Hack team also focused on helping artists plan their tour from the beginning and reduce their footprint through better routing or by offering different modes of transportation. We realized that the objectives were very similar, and our team had a few skills they were lacking in and vice versa. So we combined and it worked really well. I can’t thank them enough for how generous and collaborative they were—it was really in the Spotify spirit. 

Even though we were a large group, there was still plenty to be done. In the end, we created designs for a tool that could help someone plan the most efficient tour route possible—hopefully hitting as many locations as you can in the least amount of time while not sacrificing profit. We mostly came up with a design, how we wanted it to work, and what we think it would look like for creators.

The Green Tour Planner Hack week team prepares their presentation

You’ve been hacking for many years. How did the virtual Hack Week work for you and your project? 

Normally, you’re all hacking together in a room. Because our team was in a couple different time zones, there were basically two to three hours a day where we were all in a Hangout together and talking and collaborating. We’d use [digital] Post-its and stickies and sketch out our ideas. And then we’d go and work individually during our work days. And throughout that we’d Slack. I would be designing slides while somebody else would be sketching out the product, while somebody else was researching artists who had done recent tours, while somebody else was calculating the footprint of that tour. So everyone had their individual tasks, and then we convened for about two hours a day. Being virtual meant I got to hack with people I would have never hacked with before—normally, I only reach out to people in the same office. But this year our team was a lot of Stockholmers, people in London, and a bunch of people in New York. 

Why do you think it’s important for Spotifiers to hack on this topic—and bring it forward into their everyday work?

I think Spotify is in a really unique position of having data that artists could use to plan efficient tours. If we can tell you these are the 10 cities you should go to with the most fans, you can get the most out of it with the least amount of travel. I think that we can help encourage creators to reduce their footprint, and enable them to still tour—and then maybe engage fans and spread the word through them. I think it’s win-win all around. It’s hard to say how it will come into our daily lives yet, but I think it will impact how we measure our future targets.

This year, the For the Record team spoke to five hackers who worked across four climate-related Hack Week projects. Check out each story from Mauricio, Serah, and Gary and Stephan.

Adding That Extra ‘You’ to Your Discovery: Oskar Stål, Spotify Vice President of Personalization, Explains How It Works

October 13, 2021

Mondays and Fridays are eagerly anticipated by music lovers on Spotify who are looking to uncover new artists. Each Monday, Discover Weekly, a playlist that serves listeners with tracks they might like based on their past listening histories, is updated. Friday is Release Radar day, when the playlist refreshes with brand-new songs from a user’s favorite artists. And there’s even more personalization happening daily on Spotify across playlists our editors curate and playlists users create. 

In fact, personalization begins right within the home page, shortly after a new user downloads and signs up for Spotify. New users are prompted to select a few of their favorite artists. From that moment on, the app begins to spin up creators a listener might love based on those they’re already familiar with. “But that only accounts for a small portion of how we personalize the Spotify listening experience,” said Spotify’s Vice President of Personalization, Oskar Stål, in an interview with For the Record.

How personalization came to life

Personalization is what it sounds like: It ensures that the content you receive on Spotify is tailored to you based on the audio you love. It’s now regarded as key to the Spotify experience—but Spotify did not always focus there. Spotify was originally created 15 years ago to function more like a library, where you could go and play the songs you were interested in that you already knew about. But over time, our engineers realized that “you enjoy Spotify more if you discover more, and most people don’t have time to discover on their own,” said Oskar.

“Perhaps you’re a 46-year-old dad with three kids and no time to discover music by yourself,” Oskar joked, gesturing to himself, “or a student looking for inspiration. It’s most helpful when you’re served something up and know it will be a mix of what you like and what you might like. Then you’ll stay for more.”

Personalization, he explains, was an empowering experience for listeners who didn’t have the time or knowledge to create endless unique playlists for every dinner party or road trip. It opened up discovery on a broader level, enabling hundreds of artist discoveries per person per year. And most important, personalization helps create a better app experience because it ensures that people want to be on the app—but not spend all their time there. Spotify’s approach is to ensure listeners have a “fulfilling content diet.”

“If we really wanted to make you stay on the app three more minutes, we would play your favorite song,” Oskar explained. “All we’d ever have to do is play your favorite 20 songs on a loop. But that would mean you’re not discovering anything, and you’d eventually get tired and bored of the audio experience.” 

Spotify operates several personalization features within the app for listeners to enjoy beyond the classics like Discover Weekly and Release Radar. Earlier this year, we debuted Spotify Mixes sorted into genres, artists, or decades with music a listener loves or will love. Just last month, we introduced Blend, which merges two listeners’ taste profiles, creates a playlist that combines both of their favorites, and allows them to share the results on social media. And most recently, we launched Enhanced playlists, a feature users can toggle on or off that allows Spotify to suggest new songs that might fit in well to a user’s custom-made playlist.  

All this is in addition to what we call our “algotorial” playlists: sets of songs our editors put together to evoke a certain mood or moment that are also tailored to the individual user. “Songs to Sing in the Car might not look personalized, but it is,” said Oskar. “Each person is seeing music that fits that categorization, but that is also in line with what they enjoy listening to. In fact, there isn’t just one Spotify experience. There’s more like 365 million different experiences—one for each user—that’s deeply personalized to their wants and needs.”

How does personalization actually work? 

The answer is machine learning, a complex code-based system with thousands of inputs, all laddering up to one song recommendation, done faster than the blink of an eye. But Oskar broke it down:

“Imagine you and another person have similar music tastes. You have four of the same top artists, but your fifth artists are different. We would take those two near-matches and think, ‘Hmm, maybe each person would like the other’s fifth artist’ and suggest it. Now imagine that process happening at scale—not just one-on-one, but thousands, millions of connections and preferences being considered instantaneously, and always updating. Every day, half a trillion events, whether they are searches, listens, or likes, take place on Spotify, powering and guiding our machine learning system.”

Machine learning technology has raced forward as Spotify has matured, with enhancements we only once only dreamed of now becoming reality. This reality, too, affects where we can go with personalization and what we can serve up to listeners. “Breakthroughs in machine learning have really allowed us to rethink how we can help users discover new audio content. While in many instances machine learning has remained focused on solving for the immediate click—‘You like this song. Let me offer you more of the same kind of music’—we’re now able to better understand content and the ways listeners and creators relate to it.” 

The future of Personalization at Spotify

Podcasts, in particular, pose a significant opportunity, in part because of user input: It takes a bit longer to determine whether you like a particular show or episode or not—much more so than the 20 seconds most people take to pass judgment on a song. But as Oskar points out, we already had a great head start helping you discover podcasts on Spotify: “We’re investing heavily in developing the world’s best-recommendation algorithms to power connections between podcasters and listeners. We already have a really good system in place thanks to over 10 years recommending music, and it turns out that we can even predict what kinds of podcasts a listener might enjoy based on their taste in music.”

The impact—and potential—of personalization spreads even further. As enjoyable and relevant as personalization can be for listeners, it’s vital for creators who are looking to grow a fan base. Spotify machine learning has been trained to identify potential matches across artists, genres, and even countries. 

“Personalization is really a two-way street,” said Oskar. “The insights we’ve gathered allow us to see that there might be a Finnish artist who has music that would be a hit in Latin America. And we have the opportunity to bring that music to those listeners in Latin America through our personalization channels. This then introduces the artist to a more global audience that might not have been able to discover them on their own.”

Just as Spotify didn’t begin with the personalization capabilities listeners come to expect now, the personalization story also doesn’t end here. “Personalization is essential to the listening experience,” Oskar reminds us. “What we’re really working towards is creating a more holistic understanding of listeners by optimising for long-term satisfaction rather than for short-term clicks, offering them a more fulfilling content diet. Listeners are on a journey of discovery, and we want to help them have the best experience as they discover the millions of audio content available on Spotify.”

Spotify’s 2021 Hack Week Focuses on “Making Space”

March 19, 2021

Every year, Spotify newcomers and veterans from across R&D and more come together for Hack Week. For five days, employees dedicate their time to projects that explore new ways of making Spotify better for creators, consumers, and employees. The opportunity gives colleagues a chance to collaborate in a very intentional way across a variety of teams and timezones. This year, more than 2,000 Spotify employees signed up to participate in Hack Week (March 8 – March 12) and hundreds of hacks were considered for inspiration or adoption—all within the lens of a new, virtual platform, and an original theme.

Making Space

The theme for 2021’s event was “Making Space,” with a focus on hacks that effect positive change in Spotify products and beyond. These projects could be related to making space for under-celebrated voices or for reimagined services or revenue growth. Hackers were encouraged to reflect on the experiences of 2020 and see if there are opportunities to make space related to COVID-19, diversity, belonging, and inclusion, accessibility, and the climate emergency.

“I thought the theme of this year was a really great one. It’s very easy to think about accessibility as this set of edge cases, but depending on how broad of a definition you have, accessibility can relate to about a billion people on the planet,” shared Rorey Jones, a product manager based in Stockholm who has been with Spotify for 10 years. “Once I shifted my thinking, I really understood. I actually have a form of color blindness, and designers are often asking me questions about how things look. So it was really cool that this year’s theme put accessibility at center stage, where it should be, and allowed the entire company to consider opportunities along those lines.”

Dawn James joined Spotify last year as a Senior Staff Engineer in London, and this was her first Hack Week with the company. “I’m a huge advocate for diversity, equity, and inclusion, and for me, the theme of Making Space really pushed those buttons,” she said. “I feel like Spotify, as a company, is making an effort to make space for less well-represented cultures and demographics. Trying to become more inclusive means explicitly making space for quieter voices, regardless of the reason why those voices may be quiet.”

Hacking Away

The hacks that are explored during the week can be smaller ideas that require one or two person teams or big concepts that a large group gets together to work through.

Rorey worked with engineers to examine ways Spotify could integrate with a hardware feature on Apple’s iOS 14. The product manager and his colleagues had been contemplating ways to use this feature since it came out in September, and Hack Week was the perfect time to dig deeper. “It was nice to create a week outside of our typical priorities to have breathing room to focus on this. Less meetings and a few days where we were able to dedicate our time to this one thing and give it a really thoughtful look,” explained Rorey. 

Dawn was looking forward to kicking off her first Hack Week with the company, and signed up to contribute to two hacks. “As a new joiner to Spotify I was really impressed with the priority that the company appears to give Hack Week; the whole company is encouraged to take part,” said Dawn. “There was definitely a buzz around the event.”

Dawn’s smaller hack focused on an internal tool for developer productivity, and she was the primary engineer on the project. The other hack was an idea involving a different way for creators to utilize Spotify, and it involved a much bigger team—more than a dozen people—that worked across a variety of disciplines. “To be randomly thrown together with a whole bunch of people from across Spotify was really great,” shared Dawn. “Everyone had their own unique skill set and contributed a huge amount. It felt like a very well-rounded experience.” 

Tackling two hacks required a lot of focus, but it allowed Dawn to put different aspects of her expertise to good use: one required hands-on developer work while the other used her knowledge and network within Spotify to build a concept.

Going Virtual

This year’s Hack Week was virtual, so in addition to meetings and communication through video calls and online messaging threads, the week culminated in a Hack Fair that took place via an online portal. Participants were able to set up virtual booths and employees interested in seeing the final output could “hop in and out” of the booths to listen to a presentation or ask questions.

“I think the coolest thing about this year was that there was a digital manifestation of the event that was really akin to what it would look like normally. We had friends popping by our booth who had heard about what we were working on and colleagues stopping by that were interested in the idea,” said Rorey. The virtual event allowed employees from different offices to get a close look at what others around the world were doing—something that’s a little more challenging when the Hack Fair takes place in person. “I think it’d be really cool to see how, in the future, a digital version could even outperform a physical Hack Week due to this virtual technology.” 

From Stockholm to Seattle, this year’s Hack Week encouraged thousands of employees to bring ideas that allow for a more inclusive and accessible Spotify experience to life. The projects presented during these sprints can be the impetus for bigger concepts that listeners experience down the line (like Discover Weekly)—and there’s no telling what teams come up with next.

Unwrapping Wrapped 2019: Spotify VP of Engineering Tyson Singer Explains

February 18, 2020

As December 2019 drew near, people around the world were feeling excited—sure, for the holidays and the New Year—but also for Wrapped. For the past couple of years, Spotify has launched the elaborate end-of-year campaign showcasing the top songs, artists, albums, and, more recently, podcasts that users streamed the most throughout the year.

Last year’s Wrapped was no different, and with the dawn of a new decade, we also took a look back at the last 10 years of streaming.

But how was it all done? How were we able to deliver a seamless personalized experience for more than 200 million users across the globe around a decade’s worth of streaming data?

Well, we’re glad you asked.