Tag: making the planet cooler

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.