Tag: hack week

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.

Dispatches From Our 2021 Equity & Impact Report: Impact

April 4, 2022

We always say that Spotify reflects culture—but we are also shaped by it. And that means it’s important for us to ensure that both our platform and our company reflect the very best of the culture for the good of our listeners, employees, and planet. We do this through employee resource groups and mental health offerings, sustainability initiatives, and the representation of a diverse set of voices on our platform—as well as much more. 

We take stock of all this every year in our annual Equity & Impact Report. There’s a lot to read, so we broke it out into a few key takeaways from some of our leaders who spend their days ensuring our passion translates into purpose. 

Read on for a discussion with Social Impact Lead Casey Acierno; Sustainability Manager Ebba Grythberg; and VP, Global Head of Equity and Impact Elizabeth Nieto on impact at Spotify in 2021. You can also read about our equity work throughout the year. 

As a global company with hundreds of millions of users, Spotify is positioned to create real change through its platform. How did Spotify use the platform as a tool to create positive change last year? 

Casey: We strongly believe that reaching our audience where their needs are is one of the most powerful ways we at Spotify can drive real impact. That was the driver behind our COVID vaccination campaign last year where we identified the opportunity to provide our listeners with accurate information. Over the course of late 2020 and 2021, we launched a global information hub with up-to date news on COVID and vaccination; integrated information into over 50 podcasts worldwide with original content, host reads, and PSAs on vaccination; and ran a campaign reminding music lovers that the best way to bring live music back was to get vaccinated, by leveraging in-app messaging. 

Where are you most excited to continue raising awareness of important issues in 2022? 

Ebba: We’re excited about finding new, innovative ways of using our platform to raise awareness on the climate crisis and make sure that we amplify the voices of the people that are most impacted by it. We want to bring awareness to what’s happening and the severity of it, but at the same time, provide hope and highlight all the interesting solutions out there. With our platform, we have the opportunity to promote and curate content based in climate science, like the Spotify Original podcast How to Save a Planet and the Climate Action Hub, and we look forward to developing this further in 2022. We are also excited to explore new audio formats, using storytelling to engage our listeners on climate issues. 

Casey: In 2022, we’re excited to continue to scale our work globally and ensure we’re making a worldwide impact. Beyond working with the Sustainability team on encouraging our audience to take action on the climate crisis, we’ll also be continuing to shine a spotlight on historically marginalized communities around the world through our celebrations of cultural moments like International Women’s Day and Pride. We’re also looking forward to broadening our civic engagement work to provide our listeners with nonpartisan information and make it easier to vote by engaging in the U.S. midterm elections, as well as other countries around the world with elections this year.

The report also highlights Spotify’s commitment to reaching net-zero emissions within the next decade. What will Spotify do in 2022 to further progress toward this important goal?

Ebba: In 2022 we will continue to develop our pathway to net zero, driving reduction efforts across the company. As the majority of our emissions are coming from our value chain, collaboration with our suppliers and partners is key to achieve change, both when it comes to working with existing suppliers and choosing new suppliers that share our ambitions. In addition to reducing our emissions—and equally important—we will continue to leverage our platform to raise awareness on climate change, showcase different perspectives, and amplify voices of the most affected. 

2021 continued to be a difficult year for many people around the world. How has Spotify supported our employees and listeners regarding mental health during this time? 

Elizabeth: Since we started our Heart & Soul mental health initiative in 2018, our goal has always been to normalize the conversation and reduce stigma around mental health. Our aim is to create a stigma-free environment where we look after ourselves and each other and where it’s OK to not be OK. When COVID-19 hit, Spotify had a robust mental health support system in place. Our Heart & Soul Ambassadors across the globe could quickly mobilize around efforts to specifically address the anxiety people felt about COVID and having to adjust to work from home from one day to the other.  

Our Heart & Soul Ambassadors, who alongside their day jobs have helped us to plan and drive initiatives around mental health, have recently become Mental health First Aiders through a training program that teaches participants how to notice and support an individual who may be struggling with their mental health. They are able to have supportive conversations, listen nonjudgmentally, and guide Spotifiers toward the right support. 

In 2021, we offered a Wellness Week in early November to help Spotifiers recharge, focus on themselves, spend time with loved ones, and do something that brings them joy. 

Casey: This year, we brought World Mental Health Day to our listeners as well, encouraging them as well as our employees to “take a beat” and listen to themselves. A special edition of the Wellness Hub featured special playlists, video content, and mental health resources.

With our broad sphere of influence around the world, Spotify has a responsibility to continue our mission to be a force for good. Where do you see opportunities to continue to invest in these endeavors in the coming years? 

Elizabeth: As a global company, we see ourselves as a citizen of the world with a responsibility to make the planet and the communities that we serve and live in a better place—where creators can share their art and listeners enjoy music, information, and real connections, on and off platform. We are driven by our values. The work the Equity and Impact team does straddles our commitment to our employees, the listeners, and creators around the world. I am so proud of how the three teams came together in 2021, leveraging our different skills and raising the bar in our work. 

We have very bold goals for 2022 and beyond, supported by the commitment of our most senior leaders who believe in the positive impact that we can bring to the world. As a practice, Equity and Impact continues to evolve and we are having a much more global approach to our strategy in both DIB and Social Impact. In the case of Sustainability, we are excited to report that Spotify as a whole is committed to climate action. Just last month, we hosted a Hack Week focused on “making the planet cooler” with more than 2,400 participants and 208 hacks (and you can read about four of them here, here, here, and here). We are excited to report the results in the 2022 E&I Report. 

Read the full 2022 Equity & Impact Report here. You can hear more from our leaders on our work in equity.

Gary Niemen, Stephan Hofmann, and Their Hack Week Team Collaborate Toward Climate Footprint Calculator for Listeners

March 31, 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 Meet, 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. 

Product manager Gary Niemen

Product manager Gary Niemen is no stranger to Hack Week. In fact, his Spotify team was created thanks to a hack a few years back. And although he spent the last two Hack Weeks working solo on his own projects, this year was different. The theme inspired him to think on a much larger scale and embark on a collaboration that connected hackers within—and outside of—Spotify. 

He found a partner in Stephan Hofmann, a product manager on our Experience team and avid Hack Week participant. The pair welcomed everyone who wanted to join and assembled a huge team that spanned the U.S., U.K., Brazil, Sweden, Portugal, and India. They set to work on a project involving Spotify’s platform, an externally created carbon calculator, and the potential to merge the two.

Tell us about the hack you worked on.

Stephan: We partnered with a Swedish startup that built a carbon footprint calculator. You input how much you fly or what kind of food you tend to eat, or how you heat your home. And by answering all of these questions we can get a pretty good estimate of how many tons of carbon dioxide you use per year. We can also break those tons down into categories like where the emissions come from and get a pretty good model to understand your habits. And that’s really interesting information, because in order to change a habit, you have to understand it. And humans like to quantify things. So then, with Spotify quantifying it, we could personalize the content that we are showing to you. 

Gary: For example, if most of your emissions come from flying, we could show you podcasts on how you can offset your emissions from flying. We also thought it would be interesting to allow users to compare their carbon footprints with others—like with fellow heavy metal fans, for example, or with your favorite artist. That was another aspect to make it a bit fun; to help listeners fully engage. Essentially, once we enabled users to both calculate and understand their habits, we also wanted to help have a go at addressing their impact. 

Your hack would allow our users to take responsibility and action around their own impact on the climate. Why was that the approach you wanted to take with your hack? 

Stephan: We did a bit of thinking about the process of how someone makes a change, right? We all have responsibilities as individuals, but without a number to put to it, it can feel very ephemeral. If I drive my car, there are no immediate environmental consequences for that. But having the calculation really puts it into a quantitative perspective for people, which psychology shows is how you make a change to a habit. And because we’re actually giving them some ideas through the massive amount of content we have on our platform, we can actually give them advice and enable them to find out what they can do.

Gary: Quite early on in the week, I was looking at Spotify’s users and it’s above 400 million. I was thinking, okay, 400 million? And then the planet’s got 8 billion. So I thought, what percentage of the world population is that? That’s actually a pretty large percentage! This helped me to understand our potential impact.

Is there anything you’d like to bring from Hack Week back into your everyday work?

Product manager Stephan Hofmann

Stephan: I want to bring sustainability into my own product strategy more often. Because we’re both PMs, we have some influence. It’s given me a lot of inspiration on where we can go in our own product road maps. But I also think that a little bit of this “hack mentality,” trying something out before trying to define something completely, is a way to bring an agile methodology into a pure sprint, a chaotic sprint, that can really be beneficial. 

Gary: I spent the whole week thinking about messaging. First of all, getting the message over to the team—like a vision—to show what we’re doing. But then it starts to shift as everyone brings in their ideas. My job the whole week was keeping us aligned and focused and then removing blocks. So as the week went on, thinking “how can we communicate this to our stakeholders?” I’ll take away the importance of messaging and to always be refining. And even today, I suddenly understood even more of what we’re trying to do. 

Why is it important for Spotifiers to hack on making the planet cooler?

Gary: In our 2020 sustainability report, it says—and I can’t quote it exactly—but there’s a line there that basically says, we not only have a responsibility in terms of our emissions, but we also have a responsibility to use the impact that we the have on the global audience that we have, to make a difference. So that’s what sticks in the mind for me.

Stephan: This kind of stuff is what you think about maybe after work or when you’re, you know, having a shower or when you’re just living your daily life. And the problem is that our day jobs generally are very rigid around what is expected to be delivered. And it doesn’t leave the creative room to think, to actually build these kinds of game-changing ideas that actually do bring huge value to the world and to Spotify. Hack Week is our time to think. 

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 Meredith, Mauricio, and Serah.

Serah Njambi Kiburu and Her Hack Week Team Use Curiosity and Milestones To Connect Their Hack and Their Everyday Work

March 31, 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 Meet, 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. 

Senior Developer Advocate Serah Njambi Kiburu has only been working at Spotify for six months, but she already sees how Hack Week fits into Spotify’s larger culture—as well as her own work. For her, Hack Week offered a five-day opportunity to chase some of the facets of her role that she didn’t have bandwidth to cover in her normal day-to-day. 

“Curiosity is written into my role—I work with tech communities quite a bit—and I keep a long list of ‘what ifs’—things I need to investigate and understand, and people I need to chat with and collaborate with. That in itself was enough fodder for Hack Week.” 

Can you tell us a little bit about the hack you chose and why you decided to get involved with it?  

I sit on the Developer Experience team. We are responsible for developer.spotify.com, or “Spotify for Developers.” So we essentially make documentation and resources available to our developer community to use on a portal. Given our team is relatively new, we wanted to revamp the portal since it is about three years old. But we haven’t had time for that because we were hired recently and have had a lot of work to do. So Hack Week seemed like the perfect place to both respond to our community members’ wish lists, but also address some of the things that we saw weren’t working optimally. 

How did the theme of “making the planet cooler” play into choosing this project and into the way you approached?

The tech that our developer portal uses is over three years old and as a result has become a little inefficient. We wanted to make the most of this year’s Hack Week theme to improve the platform with climate in mind. We wanted to ensure that we use the resources available to us more efficiently, and make some energy savings in the process. 

In developer relations, there’s also a very big metric called “time to happy.” This metric looks at how long it takes for your stakeholders to go from the question they have, the issue they have, the idea they have, to feeling empowered to do their best work with the resources provided. So we also made sure to apply this metric to our work as we focused on making the planet cooler—we knew that in working towards energy efficiency, we could also cut down on people-related bottlenecks as well. 

Serah and her Hack Week team

How did Hack Week work for your team? 

Once we got the theme, our team had to decide what project to work on. After we brainstormed, we determined that there were other people and expertise we needed that we didn’t have within the team. So it was the perfect opportunity for our team to collaborate with other teams, and we reached out to them. Throughout the week, we each picked a task from a task list we had from day one. They were independent tasks, which was really helpful as there were no dependencies that could get some people stuck. 

We also determined that it would be best for us to decide which things were a “must do” and what things were a “nice to have” in our list of tasks so that we would be able to celebrate small wins as though they were each really big milestones. This kept encouraging us. We’d never worked together before in that way or in such a short amount of time, and we knew that could easily be stressful. So those milestones really helped us do so well, and we ended up working really well together. In the end, we didn’t get to the ultimate goal. But what this did is it’s given us enough to be able to make an “OKD,” a key deliverable against an objective, in Q2 to finish this work in over a longer period of time. So that was really cool. 

Why do you think that hacking on the topic of “making the planet cooler” is important for Spotify employees to think through and work on? 

As a company at the intersection of music, people, and tech, we are predisposed to think about the future and all possibilities it holds. This theme is great because it grounds us in its deeper meanings. There is only one Earth. And as we haven’t heard any music from outer space, this serves as a great reminder to preserve what we have!

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 Meredith, Mauricio, and Gary and Stephan. 

Mauricio Portilla and His Team’s Hack Week Project Aims to “Green” Spotify’s IT

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. 

Mauricio Portilla started his full-time role at Spotify approximately four weeks before Hack Week. But the five-day opportunity to dive into questions of sustainability and recycling on the tech side couldn’t have come at a better time for the Stockholm-based product designer, who quickly realized there was a great opportunity around updating the company’s Green IT processes. He started asking questions based on his background in design thinking: What are the challenges? The possible solutions? What teams are already aware of the issue and working on it? 

Then, he posted his hack, saw interest in the topic, gathered a team of six or seven people, and set to work. 

First of all, what does “Green IT” mean? 

Green IT is an effort in sustainability that focuses on initiatives around handling devices and data within a company in a way that reduces the environmental impact of those items. There are different layers of Green IT for different companies, but in many cases, Green IT includes efforts on reusing and recycling refurbished devices. 

How did it work throughout the week?

We started on Monday with an “understanding” meeting. We had a virtual mural board where we explored—kind of a brain dump—everything we wanted to know going into this hack. And then we prioritized the possible ideas that we wanted to just explore the first day.

And that was really interesting. Because our initial objectives were very general. But then we landed on more concrete objectives where we wanted to focus. Having everyone’s different approach—a lot of members of my group were from legal, others were from engineering, and others were backend developers, and then another person worked on tech procurement—was essential because together, we were able to address different sides of the same questions. The result was a problem statement and a list of contacts we wanted to interview during the week. 

The second and third day, we met with people behind the idea of Green IT. That gave us a strong validation of our hypothesis. We learned that there are legal challenges and how those would impact our plans down the road. Thursday and Friday were basically packaging everything we had learned from different people. We had the IT approach, the sustainability and leadership approach, and the tech procurement approach. With that, we created a presentation. We didn’t have time to work on a prototype, but we did come to the conclusion that we should focus on a program that helps employees reuse or recycle their devices at Spotify.  


Why is it important for Spotifiers to hack on making the planet cooler?

For a technology company that’s focused on designing products and services for people, I think it’s important that we also engage in the question of sustainability from that type of angle. The scientific discussion is very much focused on the climate change adaptation and how we reduce the impact of CO2 emissions, but industries and industry processes and industry management of how we handle things is something that we need to reinforce from within the organization. We should not only look at the effects of the things we do in terms of products, but also in the way that we work with the end user or with our clients.

What from Hack Week do you want to bring back with you into your everyday work at Spotify?

I would love to bring back the mindset of trying to find a solution to a problem in one week. Most of the time, we work over hours and months and we don’t get the time to really think and reflect back on what we learned every day. And I think that was super interesting. To see each day’s outcome, understand how it fits into the bigger problem, then ask, “Was this the thing I really wanted? No, actually. OK, so let’s try to find another way of solving that.” 

And I also felt that teamwork was extremely important for our hack. They were really engaged, really passionate. Overall, I think having different views on the team was really important. Having different people from different backgrounds in different countries sitting with me, trying to find why there’s a common interest in this idea, was something that I am taking with me. 

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 Meredith, Serah, and Gary and Stephan.

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.

Nontraditional Hack Week Projects Pave Way for Innovation and Accessibility at Spotify

March 22, 2021

For many, Hack Week brings to mind images of strings of code and furious typing across multiple monitors. And while March 8-12 may have felt like that for some of the thousands of Spotify employees who participated in our annual Hack Week, for others, a successful event looked very different. 

For the five days, employees across many teams within and outside of R&D dedicated their time to projects that explored new ways of making Spotify better for creators, consumers, and employees. The week, themed around “Making Space,” especially gave time to employees who wanted to find better ways of working, for themselves and their colleagues—together and apart.

Kathleen Bright, an Agile Coach based in London, had been thinking about building trust and relationships asynchronously since December. “Part of what I do—my professional mission—is understanding that asynchronous collaboration, or working on the same thing but not necessarily at the same time, is something we’re not practiced at,” they explained. “We’re asynchronous by default now working remotely, and people are really unfamiliar with that way of working.”

According to Kathleen, email, instant messaging, sending documents and slide decks, and relying on video calls are the top ways Spotifiers are connecting with each other in the remote world. But there’s also an opportunity to show what asynchronous communication can look like. 

“One of the things that I’ve found to be really interesting is that often, when people are talking about asynchronous collaboration or communication, they talk a lot about text and the like—saying ‘we need to get better at writing.’ And I think we do need to get better at writing. But there’s a risk of us just having massive documents and slide decks flying around even more than we already do, and that’s not inclusive or accessible. And so I really wanted to focus on other ways of communicating and bring those in,” they said. 

Kathleen spent their Hack Week alongside 12 other band members from across the company working on ways to make employees more familiar with different mediums of communication—such as drawing or recording a voice memo—as well as helping teammates build up some confidence with using these tools alongside the ones they’re already using. “The point isn’t, ‘OK, well, instead of text, I’m going to use audio,’ but to combine stuff like, ‘OK, so I’ve got audio and a transcript or subtitles. I’ve got a doc that includes images and text,’” said Kathleen.

In true asynchronous fashion, Kathleen even shared some drawings they had made throughout Hack Week following meetings with their cross-functional team and topic experts at Spotify, including Casey Acierno, Media Responsibility Lead, Social Impact, and Babar Zafar, Vice President of Product Development.

“That’s something I really appreciate about Hack Week,” Kathleen said. “How we have a block of time when everyone in R&D (and beyond) is working on this. People you wouldn’t normally get to talk to are more available. So I had a meeting with Babar, who is the head of Freemium, my mission. It was really helpful to see where he’s at with asynchronous communication.” 

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.

Spotifiers Channel Innovation and Passion at Our Annual Hack Week

October 23, 2019

From the beloved Discover Weekly playlist to lesser-known innovations, Spotify’s annual Hack Week allows employees to conceive inventive and enduring projects. During the fall event, team members from offices around the world—including Stockholm, New York, Boston, London, and Gothenburg—can participate in a week of hacking dedicated to cracking the code for the passion projects they’ve been dreaming about.

The purpose of Hack Week is to embrace the imagination and see what comes of it. The initiative allots time for employees to set aside their “normal work” and tackle their most ambitious ideas. “Hack Week is the time of year that we take to celebrate innovation and new thinking,” explains Gustav Söderström, Chief R&D Officer at Spotify. This year, over 100 teams of engineers, data scientists, project managers, and graphic designers have signed up for a chance to showcase those very skills.

Hack Week might just be a week long, but its results may very well have lasting impact. The longstanding tradition at Spotify endures so we can set aside time for the entire company to dream, build, and surprise the world—and ourselves—with our creativity.

Watch the video below for a glimpse into the magic that is Hack Week.

Five Ways to Make Your Discover Weekly Playlists Even More Personalized

May 2, 2019

Every Monday morning, Spotify listeners are greeted—some might say gifted—with a new Discover Weekly playlist to help set their soundtrack for the next seven days. The weekly dose of recommended songs started as a project from one of Spotify’s Hack Weeks, and quickly caught on. Now, every Monday, listeners get a new, curated playlist of 30 songs from a variety of artists to explore.

Ever logged in to find a seemingly perfect Discover Weekly? While it might seem like wizardry, Discover Weekly becomes more personalized the more you use and engage with it. Here are five ways to keep the curation “magic” going:

1. Heart This

Love a new track you just heard? Click the “heart” icon next to the song on mobile or desktop, and there will be more where that came from down the road.

2. Follow Along

Make sure to “follow” your favorite artists—the curation magic will pull in songs from similar artists that we have a hunch you’ll like. As for your “followed” artists, head over to your Release Radar playlist, which updates every Friday, to hear all their new music right after it drops.

3. You Really Really Like It

If you’re totally obsessed with a new-to-you track, add it to your own personally curated playlists. This lets us know the song is more than just a momentary obsession, and we’ll be sure to serve up songs in the same vein.

4. Don’t Overthink It

We all have that friend who shares a ton of tracks from their favorite new artist. But what if they’re not really your taste? Not to worry: Listening to a song once without replaying or “hearting” won’t affect your Discover Weekly selections.

5. Keep It Private

If you’re listening to music you may not want to show up in your Discover Weekly (for example, if your friend with questionable music taste is DJing a party from your phone), put your Spotify on Private Mode. If you’re streaming from desktop, simply click the down arrow shaped like a “V” in the top right corner of the app and select “Private Session.” For mobile and tablet, navigate to Settings, then Social, and turn on “Private Session.”

There you have it! All the information you need for future playlists. Now that you’re more in control of your Discover Weekly destiny, prepare for a whole new world of soon-to-be-favorite songs and artists at your fingertips every Monday.

Open your Discover Weekly and get listening!

Love Discover Weekly? Thank a Hack for That

June 5, 2018

Your beloved Discover Weekly playlist started out like many other innovations at Spotify—as a line of code. But thanks to Spotify’s annual Hack Week and various Hack Days, our engineers have plentiful opportunities to turn their wildest ideas into reality.

The music industry has a long history of hackathons, with Spotify as a consistent sponsor. “In fact,” says longtime music hackathon participant and now-Spotify data/backend engineer Jen Lamere, “a lot of people have their connection to Spotify through some sort of hackathon, since a lot of the flagship products were made through those events. Spotify is keeping the flame alive.” According to Lamere, even employees who are not software engineers can use Hack Week as an opportunity to learn coding basics throughout the week.

Most Spotify engineers from the Stockholm, New York, Boston, and Gothenburg offices participate in the week, using the time they might ordinarily allot to “normal work” to make something helpful or just plain fun. The week, which is usually in the fall, culminates in a presentation or science fair (depending on the office) in which teams demo their projects. Hack Days, meanwhile, are a little more sporadic. For the User Engagement team, they occur for two days every four weeks and include a Friday night pitch session. Then, Monday and Tuesday are reserved for hacking.

If a hack works, it might make its way into a test build of the app so that a small number of Spotify users can try it out and see if it works outside the music-nerd engineering bubble. Yet some Hack Week and Hack Days projects are focused behind-the-scenes, on ideas Spotify users will never see themselves, but still benefit from. For example, lessening the time it takes for Spotify engineers to make an app update build, or helping Spotify employees find weirdly named conference rooms more quickly. “It’s all about making our lives a little easier and helping us get our jobs done,” says Lamere. Other hacks, like Discover Weekly, become integrated in platform updates, or even a part of large-scale marketing campaigns.

“Spotify’s culture and strong support of Hack Week is a fun way to let our engineers, designers and other employees express their creativity for innovating on music technology,” says Senior Data Engineer and Hack Day Emcee Tim Chagnon. “Sometimes the best benefit from Hack Week is just the experience of banding together with a new group of colleagues and learning something new by working with people from a diverse set of backgrounds and experiences.”

Check out the results of four of our recent hacks—from a site that lets you find the most dramatic part of a song, to helping immigrants better enjoy the sounds of their home country.

Where Is The Drama? (Paul Lamere)

Music Hack Day hall-of-famer Paul Lamere’s web app automatically finds the most dramatic part of any song on Spotify, and plays it for you with a single click. It works by analyzing the loudness profiles of the songs, to find the passage with the biggest build-up. To try it, simply click here while playing any song through Spotify.

NPR Podcasts Notification (Jake Lehroff)

Around 125K users searched for NPR podcasts before we had them (but now we do!) Jake Lehroff didn’t want to miss out, so when the podcasts launched, this hack sent an in-app notification to the users who had searched.

Milestone Printer (Skyler Johnson)

Skyler Johnson from Spotify’s NYC office made the handmade-looking printer pictured above that cranks out a not-so-steady stream of statistics – a new one every time an artist breaks one of our streaming records in a country with Spotify. Most hacks don’t make it to hardware status, but Skyler’s is a great visualization of what our work can do.

One Hit Wonderment (Glenn McDonald)

Glenn McDonald’s hack used Spotify data and stats to put the biggest one-hit wonders—from Tal Bachman’s “She’s So High” to Deep Blue Something’s “Breakfast at Tiffany’s”—in one place.

It works by ranking major artists by the percentage of their popularity that comes from their top track. Glenn also took it a step further, and made a playlist for songs that are the opposite of one-hit wonders.