Validating a product idea and prioritisation: Interview Question

You are the PM for Spotify Artists. Your VP Product wants you to add a stories feature on the app for artists to get more engagement. Will you do it? Why and why not?

A product manager brings structure to the whole chaos. Therefore it is very important to exhibit this trait when solving problems. It is your job to deeply understand the problem and who are you solving it for. Therefore, a candidate who doesn’t ask suitable clarifying questions is a misfit.

As I am not a Spotify artist, my first question is to validate if my understanding of the feature in the current app is aligned with that of the interviewer. So, I ask basically when an artist uploads a story through their app, users can see stories of the artists they follow on the Spotify music app.

The next question is, how do we define “engagement”? First, enough artists should be uploading stories frequently (ideally daily). Then fans tap on the stories which will appear on the home page to get an insight into the artists lives, feel more connected and also get to know about “upcoming launches for music, merch and concerts”. This will help Spotify’s mission of paying artist’s for their creativity and bringing artists and fans closer.

Another question to ask is why have we chosen “stories” as a “solution” to this problem. As a PM it is crucial to be married to the problem and not the solution.

Now let’s focus on the different user personas:

If I think of myself, I am a causal listener who comes to Spotify with a set of few songs and thanks to some recommendations from my friends and Spotify’s algorithm, I have a great collection of songs that I listen to. The “point” here is I am not wedded to an artist, I just love random songs.

The other “persona” is of people who love creators, are huge fans. People who would go to concerts, have posters of their favourite artists in their bedrooms and would love to be a step closer to them.

Prioritising the personas, given the nature of the problem the first persona doesn’t seem to be the right fit to implement this feature for at-least to start with, simply because they don’t care. Therefore I will pick persona #2.

Now, let’s breakdown our strengths, weaknesses, opportunities and any threats as a company to see if implementing this makes sense.

Strengths:

The Spotify app has an artist search and artist pages which currently has minimal information about artists. They do show concert dates, merch if available but this now feels very transactional. Adding “stories” will give fans an insight into the artists life, make them feel more appreciative of their talent, feel more connected and the sale of tickets, merch will feel more “pulled” instead of “pushed”.

Spotify has started doing “exclusive” content with a few successful creators. Spotify could have such a “deal” where artists promote exclusive stories for their fans only on Spotify.

Spotify also has a great tech team and therefore building and rolling this feature out should be intrinsic. The adoption of this feature given the functionality is similar to other platforms would be fairly easy as it is familiar.

Weakness:

Most users/creators are used to posting updates on Instagram where they have amassed millions of followers. They can do a post, a story, a live campaign all in the same platform which feels more holistic and engaging. Spotify is not viewed as a “go-to” for engaging with artists.

Artists already post on multiple platform and adding one more to that list is a habit that may take sometime to stick.

Monitoring/Moderating whether the content posted on stories is exclusive or not can be a challenge and would require sophisticated algorithms or manual labour.

Opportunity:

Stories can be a used as building blocks to further create an eco-system where fans connect with their favorite artists. We can host live sessions and build that close knit community and make the users feel how much more they can contribute to Spotify’s mission. This will also solidify the dominance we have over other competitors like Apple Music.

Threat:

We are a music app to the core and should prevent ourselves from turning into a social media company.

The feature is also particularly easy to replicate and has already been exhaustively used. For example on Twitter and Linkedin. Hopefully the fans don’t perceive this as yet another floating feature on their home screens.

To summarise, it can be a growth experiment rolled out to a small segment of verified or very popular artists and a small fan base. This is easy to implement and therefore through this we will not be incurring a lot of tech debt. In the end, this is a reversible decision and there is much to gain if it works out.

Let me know your thoughts on how would you go about this problem in the comments below.