Decode A Job Posting from Spotify: Senior Product Manager — Playlist Platform
Spotify is an innovative business that changes the surrounding reality: almost everyone you see on the street or in a café wearing headphones listens to music on Spotify.
If I didn’t have my favorite Connected Trip product at Booking.com, I would have responded to such a vacancy myself. Why?
The fact that the whole team will only deal with the single playlist functionality suggests that everything will be very serious. That implies a lot of traffic, internal customers, ultra-optimization of customer experience, and, as a result, the need to build a platform and not just a one-time feature.
Here’s the general description:
Delivering the best Spotify experience possible. To as many people as possible. In as many moments as possible. That’s what the Experience team is all about. We use our deep understanding of consumer expectations to enrich the lives of millions of our users all over the world, bringing the music and audio they love to the devices, apps and platforms they use every day. Know what our users want? Join us and help Spotify give it to them.
What technical knowledge does Spotify expect from a candidate?
Maintaining and scaling the Playlist Platform for the large internal customer base and supporting the playlists of millions of users.
As you already understand, the product is a platform to support the heart of any streaming music service: Playlists. Here, an experienced (and somewhat technical) product manager (PM) sees not just a “list of songs” on the iPhone screen but also an algorithm for choosing their “right” order, simple and intuitive options to add/remove songs, and auto-generating playlists based on listening history and recommendations. Not to mention storing all this so that not a single favorite song is lost!
Okay, we definitely need a team for that. Who will be there? The following block answers:
Collaborate with designers, engineers, researchers and data scientists to identify problems, opportunities and solutions that will support the needs of our users and impact our goals / metrics.
This list of stakeholders (designers, engineers, data scientists, etc.) explains that we need not just a “techie” who will monitor technical indicators but a product manager who will combine knowledge of the technical world with an understanding of customers' desires and main company metrics.
For example, such PM can notice from the “next button” click patterns that users often listen to only 10 sec of the song before switching to the next, and to address that, introduce a new platform feature, “song preview. The following requirement re-emphasizes this:
You have the ability to translate technical needs into simple understandable requirements and be a translator between tech and design/product and know when to push back.
I would like to draw your attention to the part “translate tech needs into simple, understandable requirements.” No one needs smarty-pants throwing technical terms around. On the contrary, PMs who can explain things in simple words (perhaps adjusting their explanations for each stakeholder) are valued way more.
Even harder skills are needed
Good understanding of how to define and build APIs which can be utilized by internal customers of a platform. Ability to understand tech architecture and systems and to know when a solution should be platformed or not (cost/opportunity exercise).
This section, once again, reminds us of the depth of the problem — playlists are the heart (literally) of the whole music experience. Therefore, they see “just one playlist feature” as a platform. A tech-savvy PM can now roughly sketch the architecture of the application:
- The top-level features service of the internal customers: main application, recommendations service, external integrations service (say, music player in cars), audiobooks service, etc.
- API inside the platform: /add_song, /remove_song, /shuffle, /repeat, /enqueue_after, etc. One can explain for hours what API is, but it is better just to try it yourself at this free resource.
- The central “brain” of the platform. It is responsible for the playback state: it says which song the listener is now on and what will happen next.
- A very reliable and quick storage service for all the playlists. Like, ALL of them. A user typically has anywhere from one to ten playlists, so with the number of users now being 517 million… you do the math.
- Last, the ability to scale it all for podcasts, live streams, and other related products is yet to come.
I went beyond and sketched the company's overall architecture — you can see that Playlists Service is only one piece of the big picture.
You can ask here: why should PM think so deeply? A smart company would want to hire a PM who can build it properly once and for all. That will speed up the business development should they start working with other products, such as audiobooks:
Identifying new opportunities to evolve the platform
Building a platform that scales for many clients (ubiquity strategy)
Ensure the platform is build on modern language and optimized
By the way, as is usually the case in similar vacancies, drawing architecture and discussing the nuances will surely be a part of the PM interview. By giving it to you, employers will probe whether you see the depth and whether you can decompose the task into pieces.
If you like to practice this tricky topic, you can explore exercises here. There are some step-by-step guides on how to build architecture for various products like Uber, Food Delivery, and even Spotify.
I have to say that this knowledge will also be helpful in your daily work. As you probably guessed, your current product can also be broken down into pieces of architecture, allowing you to see it inside out, which, in turn, means that you can manage it better.
And some core product manager skills, of course
Further, the Spotify vacancy again gives us a clue that all this will need to be converted into a consistent strategy, and the PM will need to be able to defend it in front of colleagues:
You have experience in contributing, debating and crafting strategies
You have strong writing and debating skills to take part in strategic discussions
Finally, this job listing mentions two more “classical” requirements for the position of a Product Manager: analytics and A/B experimenting:
Triangulate data and insights to develop a robust product strategy and advise decision making
Utilize A/B testing and other methodologies to validate the success of your chosen approach
I am sure most PMs have basic knowledge of data and A/B testing. This job opening, however, being a Senior-level position, requires a deeper understanding and the ability to make data-driven decisions.
So, here, you will need to be knowledgeable of a statistical test for interpreting the result, choice of A/B experiment metrics, using SQL and Python to analyze hypotheses, common mistakes, etc., quickly. I will write a separate article about this.
Products are not only about UI
In this analysis, I wanted to read between the lines of the job description and show that sometimes products are not only about UI or gluing together well-known blocks (website, chatbot, delivery) to create one big picture.
There are usually no such blocks for the PMs of innovative companies, as their area is so new and complex. And many exciting tasks, such as the Spotify Playlist Platform, arise precisely where business and complex tech come together.
I hope it helped! And if you are considering applying for a similar job, I wish you the best of luck in this endeavor!
I would like to thank Tremis Skeete, Executive Editor of Product Coalition, for his valuable contributions to the editing of this article.
I also thank Product Coalition founder Jay Stansell, who has provided a collaborative product management education environment.
