How Spotify Builds Products – my slides from May 2016 talks

These are my slides from the talks I gave at infoShare in GDansk and to ao.com and Think Money in Manchester. The talk in Poland was a shortened version of this content. This is a sort of mega-mix of many of my previous talks. This talk ends up presenting a bit more of a coherent picture on how Spotify’s culture and organization go hand-in-hand with it’s data-driven product development.

As with most of my talks, the majority of the content was in the spoken parts instead of the slides. I will hopefully have a video to share soon from one of these talks…

Innovation, Autonomy and Accountability: my talk to the UK Department of Media, Culture and Sport

I was asked to speak at the UK Department of Media, Culture and Sport in January. One thing that often comes up when you talk to people about autonomous organizations is the subject of accountability. This is something that we even discuss within Spotify, from time to time.

When talking to a government organization, especially one who is responsible for distributing funding for programs, like the DCMS, the concern around accountability is paramount. At the same time, governmental organizations are also looking to innovate to provide better services to their constituents.

My goal with this talk was to present the idea of how a governmental organization could innovate by using autonomous teams while maintaining accountability by picking good metrics to measure success of programs and measuring those metrics on an ongoing basis. This would allow the programs to have autonomous control of their work and innovate, while having a objective measurement of the value that they were returning.

My slides from ProductTank Sthlm

I was asked to speak about how we align around the product while we maintain autonomous teams. Given that this was a talk to product people rather than engineers or coaches, I tried to keep it focused around product definition and prioritization. As usual, I don’t like to put many words in the slides, so hopefully you get the gist. There is a recording being made, so hopefully that will get posted and then I will link to it here.

Interesting UX presentation from Theresa Neil

The deck is a nice, loose, taxonomy of different design styles (some of the examples seem to have multiple styles to me), the examples are really good and actually pointed out some cool sites that I hadn’t heard about. Definitely worth a flip through if you have an interest in this stuff.

via Ahmed Rabieh