Tag: R&D

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.

Rachel Bittner on Basic Pitch: An Open Source Tool for Musicians

September 1, 2022

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Music creation has never been as accessible as it is now. Gone are the days of classical composers, sheet music, and prohibitively expensive studio time when only trained, bankrolled musicians had the opportunity to transcribe notes onto a page. As technology has changed, so too has the art of music creation—and today it is easier than ever for experts and novices alike to compose, produce, and distribute music. 

Now, musicians use a computer-based digital standard called MIDI (pronounced “MID-ee”). MIDI acts like sheet music for computers, describing which notes are played and when—in a format that’s easy to edit. But creating music from scratch, even using MIDI, can still be very tedious. If you play piano and have a MIDI keyboard, you can create MIDI by playing. But if you don’t, you must create it manually: note by note, click by click. 

To help solve this problem, Spotify’s machine learning experts trained a neural network to predict MIDI note events when given audio input. The network is packaged in a tool called Basic Pitch, which we just released as an open source project. 

“Basic Pitch makes it easier for musicians to create MIDI from acoustic instruments—for example, by singing their ideas,” says Rachel Bittner, a research manager at Spotify who is focused on applied machine learning on audio. “It can also give musicians a quick ‘starting point’ transcription instead of having to write down everything manually, saving them time and resources. Basically, it allows musicians to compose on the instrument they want to compose on. They can jam on their ukulele, record it on their phone, then use Basic Pitch to turn that recording into MIDI. So we’ve made MIDI, this standard that’s been around for decades, more accessible to more creators. We hope this saves them time and effort while also allowing them to be more expressive and spontaneous.”

For the Record asked Rachel to tell us more about the thinking and development that go into Basic Pitch and other machine learning efforts, and how the team decided to open up the tool for anyone to access and to innovate on.

Help us understand the basics. How are machine learning models being applied to audio?

Rachel Bittner

On the audio ML (machine learning) teams at Spotify, we build neural networks—like the ones that are used to recognize images or understand language—but ours are designed specifically for audio. Similar to how you ask your voice assistant to identify the words you’re saying and also make sense of the meaning behind those words, we’re using neural networks to understand and process audio in music and podcasts. This work combines our ML research and practices with domain knowledge about audio—understanding the fundamentals of how music works, like pitch, tone, tempo, the frequencies of different instruments, and more.

What are some examples of machine learning projects you’re working on that align with our mission to give “a million creators the opportunity to live off their art”?

Spotify enables creators to reach listeners and listeners to discover new creators. A lot of our work helps with this in indirect ways—for example, identifying tracks that might go well together on a playlist because they share similar sonic qualities like instrumentation or recording style. Maybe one track is already a listener’s favorite and the other one is something new they might like.

We also build tools that help creative artists actually create. Some of our tech is in Soundtrap, Spotify’s digital audio workstation (DAW), which is used to produce music and podcasts. It’s like having a complete studio online. And then there’s Basic Pitch, which is a stand-alone tool for converting audio into MIDI that we just released as an open source project. We open sourced Basic Pitch and built an online demo, so anyone can use it to translate musical notes in a recording (including voice, guitar, or piano).

Unlike similar ML models, Basic Pitch is not only versatile and accurate at doing this, but it’s also fast and computationally lightweight. So the musician doesn’t have to sit around forever waiting for their recording to process. And on the technological and environmental side, it uses way less energy—we’re talking orders of magnitude less—compared to other ML models. We named the project Basic Pitch because it can also detect pitch bends in the notes, which is a particularly tricky problem for this kind of model. But also because the model itself is so lightweight and fast.

What else makes Basic Pitch a unique machine learning project for Spotify?

I mentioned before how computationally lightweight it is—that’s a good thing. In my opinion, the ML industry tends to overlook the environmental and energy impact of their models. Usually with ML models like this—whether it’s for processing images, audio, or text—you throw as much processing power as you can at the problem as the default method for reaching some level of accuracy. But from the beginning, we had a different approach in mind: We wanted to see if we could build a model that was both accurate and efficient, and if you have that mindset from the start, it changes the technical decisions you make in how you build the model. Not only is our model as accurate as (or even more accurate than) similar models, but since it’s lightweight, it’s also faster, which is better for the user, too. 

What’s the benefit of open sourcing this tool?

It gives more people access to it since anyone with a web browser can use the online demo. Plus, we believe the external contributions from the open source community help it evolve as software to create a better, more useful product for everyone. For example, while we believe Basic Pitch solves an important problem, the quality of the MIDI that our system (and others’) produces is still far from human-level accuracy. By making it available to creators and developers, we can use our individual knowledge and experience with the product to continue to improve that quality. 

What’s next for Basic Pitch in this area?

There’s so much potential for what we can do with this technology in the future. For example, Basic Pitch could eventually be integrated into a real-time system, allowing a live performance to be automatically accompanied by other MIDI instruments that “react” to what the performer is doing.

Additionally, we shared an early version of Basic Pitch with Bad Snacks, an artist-producer who has a YouTube channel where she shares production tips with other musicians. She’s been playing around with Basic Pitch, and we’ve already made improvements to it based on her feedback, fixing how the online demo handles MIDI tempo, and other things to make it work better for a musician’s workflow. We partnered with her to use Basic Pitch to create an original composition, which she released as a single on Spotify. She even posted a behind-the-scenes video on her channel showing how she used Basic Pitch to create the track. The violin solo section is particularly cool.

But it’s not just artists and creators that we’re excited about. We’re equally looking forward to seeing what everyone in the open-source developer community has been doing with it. We expect to discover many areas for improvement, along with new possibilities for how it could be used. We’re proud of the research that went into Basic Pitch and we’re happy to show it off. We’ll be even happier if musicians start using it as part of their creative workflows. Share your compositions with us!

Create a cool track using Basic Pitch? Share it on Twitter with the hashtag #basicpitch and tag the team @SpotifyEng.

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.

Daniel Ek, Dawn Ostroff, and Sten Garmark Shed Light on the Insights That Led Spotify Into the Podcast Arena

April 22, 2021

Did you know that Spotify could have been a video company? This is just the latest revelation from Spotify cofounder and CEO Daniel Ek in our Chief R&D Officer Gustav Söderström’s podcast, Spotify: A Product Story. The miniseries brings listeners insider stories of product strategy and development at Spotify as told by the people who built it. 

In the most recent episode, Gustav talks about Spotify’s search for its “first second product” with Daniel. And for a moment, that product could have been TV. But thanks to internal experiments during Hack Week, as well as the realization that listeners in Germany were using the platform to play audiobooks (uploaded as music tracks) the team realized there was a better opportunity: spoken-word content.

“There were so many signals that pointed out that this was the right thing,” shares Daniel. “And then, ultimately, if we could do this and if we could merge podcasts with music and basically get into audio, we would be in a much better place strategically . . . It was clear there wasn’t anyone globally going after this opportunity, and that opportunity is massive.”

So began Spotify’s shift to an audio-first strategy in 2019. 

“We felt that one of the big things that we could do was accelerate podcast growth,” shares Sten Garmark, Spotify’s Head of Consumer Experience, who is a guest on the episode. “This is a fantastic medium that has seen a lot of growth, but it’s not a true mainstream product yet—it wasn’t when we started and it’s arguably still not.”

Dawn Ostroff, our Chief Content Officer, joins Gustav on the podcast to talk about developing original content to lead the audio space and accelerating podcast growth in the process. “Everybody appreciated the fact that we could put our own imprimatur on an industry, that we could lead the entire medium,” explains Dawn. “The industry had been so fragmented, and [before Spotify], nobody had stepped in to really aggregate the business from either a creative stance or from the business stance or from the advertising point of view.”

Follow along as Gustav and his guests recount the journey and share four key product strategy lessons Spotify learned along the way. 

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.

Introducing the New Miniseries ‘Spotify: A Product Story’

March 11, 2021

It’s one thing to imagine the future of audio, quite another to actually build it—and yet that’s what Spotify set out to do over the past decade. Along the way, there’s been plenty of previously untold stories filled with colorful characters, product challenges and successes, and many lessons learned. So in our new podcast miniseries, Spotify: A Product Story, our Chief R&D Officer, Gustav Söderström, will bring listeners these insider stories of product strategy and development at Spotify—as told by the people who built it. 

“In this podcast, for the first time, we’ll pull back the curtain on some never-before-heard stories of Spotify’s product journey,” explains Gustav in the series trailer. The miniseries will include “the secrets and strategies behind our biggest product launches and pivots—from the very first desktop app, built in a small apartment in Stockholm, to the brand-new audio formats we’re exploring right now.”

Over the course of the series, Gustav will delve into the art and science of product strategy and development alongside special guests from the music, business, and tech industries—from Lars Ulrich to Mary Meeker to Matthew Ball to Sean Parker. He’ll also interview the current and previous Spotifiers deeply involved in Spotify’s journey, including Daniel Ek, Dawn Ostroff, Sten Garmark and Oskar Stål. These conversations will give an inside glimpse into topics like Spotify’s commitment to problem solving and improving the user experience.

Catch the Spotify: A Product Story trailer and prologue, “The most epic battle in the music history,” available on Spotify today, and look out for the first episode, “How do you steal from a pirate?” premiering soon. 

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.

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.

Meet the Talented Tech Minds Building Spotify in London

April 17, 2019

It’s no secret that London is one of the most vibrant cities in the world, but with Spotify UK’s move to a new office building this month, the conversation around London as an innovative tech epicenter has been growing. “Spotify in London has to be part of Spotify globally, but also must embrace the individuality and uniqueness of London,” says John Hayes, Director of Engineering. “No matter where you are from, you’ll find something going on in London that interests you and that you can learn from. There is a culture of top talent seeking the most interesting opportunities here.”

Late last year, Spotify announced that London would become the location for the Swedish company’s new tech hub. In the months since, Spotify has been busy building up a diverse and talented team of developers, data scientists, product managers and designers from around the world, people eager to add their stories to the company’s ever-evolving narrative. “We did a ‘getting to know each other’ exercise with the team,” John says. “To show where we were from, we all placed a pin on a map of the world. We had such a large mix of backgrounds that we ran out of pins and had to improvise with paperclips.”

And that’s just the beginning. “We spend time bringing the right people into the company who want to change the industry from a personal perspective,” John says. “It’s humbling to work with people who bring so many ideas from so many backgrounds.”

Like London itself, our newest office reflects many different cultures and experiences, but is equally connected to Spotify tradition. We’ve even put our own spin on the fika break: Sweden’s take on afternoon tea.

But who better to tell our story than London Spotifiers themselves? Below, meet a few of the many talented tech minds building out Spotify’s engineering team in London.

 

Name: Madalina Sicoi
From: Romania
Title: Software Development Engineer

Madalina Sicoi

I work on awareness and conversion for Spotify Premium. My day-to-day work is an exciting blend of coding, testing, liaising with stakeholders and supporting the rollout of various initiatives.

I had been keeping a close eye on Spotify long before the company established a tech presence in London due to my love of its product and the stories around its tech and culture. Spotify is a fun place to work, and I’m always surrounded by talented people that get the best out of me. Spotify brings a transparency that’s rare among large tech companies.

 

Name: Daniela Estevez Fernandez
From: Buenos Aires, Argentina
Title: Senior Product Designer

Daniela Estevez Fernandez

I love the idea of working with a product that is used by millions of people every day. Every single person that you encounter here at Spotify is insanely smart, and most of us come from completely different backgrounds. I think that’s a perfect fit for the London talent pool.

From a user experience perspective, it’s interesting to think about how we prepare ourselves for the future of audio streaming in a truly connected world with hundreds of different types of devices (mobile, web, smart speakers, consoles, smart watches, etc.). How can I deliver a consistent and seamless experience to all users? I’d love to think that everyone listens to audio in the same way that I do, but the reality is very different, so that’s why I need to pay extra attention to what are our users are telling me. I focus on trying to deliver the best experience to all users, regardless of their device and where they are in the world.

 

Name: Jon Hare-Winton
From: Berkshire, UK
Title: Quality Engineer

Jon Hare-Winton

I work as an engineer in a small team, helping my team to ensure quality in everything we build. I’ve played drums in bands since I was 12, and have always wanted an opportunity to combine my professional life with my biggest passion.

The ever-changing nature of software development is kind of mirrored in the evolution of music streaming. It follows the patterns of early adoption, through to becoming mass market, followed by disruption. It’s a fascinating time to be involved in both fields, as nothing is going to stand still for long.

 

Name: Dimitrios Klimis
From: Greece
Title: Software Engineer

Dimitrios Klimis

I listen to lots (and I mean lots) of music. Spotify has been a big part of my life for a few years now after a former colleague suggested I give it a go about six years ago. The ability to instantly have access to almost every album ever produced and discover new music was, and still is, mind-blowing. So naturally, when given the opportunity to become a Spotify team member, I couldn’t resist. Spotify is like a dream job to me.

It’s evident that technology has conquered most aspects of our lives today and, as we evolve, we ask more from it. We as users need ubiquitous, less-intrusive technology which assists us to achieve our goals. For example, to discover music without actually looking for it. I believe Spotify has made considerable steps in this direction and we’ll see more and more in the future. I’m excited to be part of that journey.

 

Name: Riccardo Buzzotta
From: Padua, Italy
Title: Senior Product Designer

Riccardo Buzzotta

My role entails delivering elegant design solutions for Spotify Premium’s conversion funnel, with the help of my design team, now spanning across several time zones. Furthermore, I support my teammates in shipping quality work that contributes to a long-term vision.

London was already on my radar as a city to work and live in. Spotify coincidentally came along and when it was clear we both liked each other, I simply could not say no. I strongly feel that Spotify will make for a killer presence in London. Not just as a renowned consumer brand, but also as an incredible powerhouse of ideas and excellence on many fronts, as it’s been known to do worldwide.

 

Name: Ambreen Subzwari
From: Welsh-Pakistani origin
Title: PI Manager for the Conversion Product Area in Ironbank

Ambreen Subzwari

As a female of South Asian origin working in the tech industry, I can say firsthand that the landscape of gender equality has really shifted for the better over the last few years. Spotify, for me, epitomises the equilibrium of opportunities for men and women within the organisation. Not just because of the number of talented women we have in leadership roles, but also in the general company culture. For instance, as a working mother, I have been given full support by my manager and peers to work specific office hours to minimise disruption to my personal life— something that has not always been the case in previous companies. In addition to this, I also feel I have the same set of opportunities and support available to me as my male counterparts in order to climb my way up the Spotify career path. I have seen no distinction between the genders in what is required to achieve the next steps other than skills and performance.

 

Name: Yusik Kim
From: Daejeon, South Korea
Title: Machine Learning Engineer

Yusik Kim

I use machine learning to detect payment fraud. I spend a lot of time looking at payment data from different angles and select appropriate features to feed into the models. It mostly involves statistical modeling, implementing data pipelines, and ML algorithms.

When I was a student, I spent a lot of time discovering new music through buying albums and from what friends recommended. Once I had a job, I no longer had the time to invest in music discovery and I stopped listening to music for a while. Then Spotify came along and solved those problems for me. So I am passionate about making it even better.

 

Name: Muge Ersoy
From: Istanbul, Turkey
Title: Engineering Manager

Muge Ersoy

I was inspired to work at Spotify when I gave a talk at a Women in Tech conference in Amsterdam. Spotify was across from our booth and I had the chance to meet many women in STEM and get to know their policies regarding diversity and inclusion. It amazed me and I immediately wanted to be part of it. Not to mention that I am a big fan of the product itself and its discovery playlists.

I’ve played in amateur bands as a drummer. I have always had a special connection to music creation and am a true believer of the power of music. It makes the world a better place.

 

Name: Nicole Shephard
From: Denver, Colorado
Title: Design Manager

Nicole Shephard

I’m responsible for building and supporting a design team to explore what’s next for Spotify Premium. This means recruiting great design talent, working closely with our Product Insights team to deeply understand our customers, supporting designers in their exploration and testing of new concepts, and telling a great story around our hunches, experiments, learnings, and decisions.

My husband is a full-time musician, so the opportunity to contribute to Spotify’s goal of connecting artists with fans is quite personal. Music is one of the most powerful forces in the world—it has the ability to connect us, move us, and awake parts of us in a way only music can.