Epic Problem Stories & solving them: Spotlight on Spotify

Epic Problem Stories & solving them: Spotify now has, 165 million paying subscribers, is available in 178 markets, and makes $21 billion a year, with strategies that are focused on smart yet consumer-friendly pricing, keeping a check that their artists are happy to provide great songs and releases, the relentless efforts into transforming the odd 200 million active users, that haven't paid and not to mention their efforts in artificial intelligence and ensuring that you can discover new music with ease, but how did they get here, how did they address their key problems, keep growing and find innovative solutions to pioneer streaming in the industry?

As Product Owners, we simply must make our problems known, and often enough we have round-table meetings with our C-suites and management where a complaint is addressed. In the below examples, I made up a product complaint that I once heard from my management team as an exercise for this spotlight/

be transparent when telling the 'why'

I like writing my key problems in the form of EPIC stories, here are my examples and a way you could approach them too.

The initiative 'We need to increase our activation rate, it's stagnant and falling behind & we need fresh solutions'

Primarily speaking, most of the time, you would already measure the progress of a product, at some companies, you would have the visibility of the key metrics of a product and how users use its features. So, we're going to use the above example as a way to understand how to apply.

Gather intel by asking questions around you

Let's say that you have been averaging on a flat growth % MoM, and marketing has spent more than double their efforts in traffic, but the conversion is just not happening on the activation. So how do you begin, questions of is this a marketing issue or is this a product issue must be addressed and honestly answered.

Did they change their tactic, recipe, audience targeting if not and qualified audiences are going to your application but not converting as they use, then you need to throw in some excitement to the product.

write your problem statement

Let's throw in the problem statement to provide some framework and context to the task.

The Problem Statement 'Our product is stagnant, our users don't activate an account straight away, they are offered discounts and they still don't bite'

kick-off a design sprint

So, the tactic of offering discounts, is not working, what can you do now, how do you explore a key fundamental problem as a product manager and how do you implement this in this practice of agile to get to what users are really thinking? It's probably time to plan a design sprint to kick-off your ideation in order to help you iterate to find valuable outcomes for the user and address the key problems of growth.

synthesize your design sprint findings

'We found that a competitor is undercutting us and creating better discount offers with our product, we could discount and we could also develop a better way to keep them by releasing a new feature'

That's definitely one way to counter-attack, but trust me you don't want to go into a price war unless you significantly can and own the market, but until then, lowering price may not be an option, but differentiating what you offer and offering more could be with releasing new features.

This is just a hypothesis of a quick problem I have encountered in the past, so it's not the holy grail of approaches and the best way to figure it all out is to conduct another round of user interviews, to find out what key users want to see more of, what non-users would purchase, remember that customers will always say what they want, but not often necessarily pay for a product or use a feature just because they thought it's a good idea, but what you can do is get closer to understand the market needs and validating it quickly.

conduct user interviews

I want to be able to listen to my subscription offline, when I'm not using the internet, so that I don't have to use data'

Case study: Spotify

In this scenario, we're taking the leap into the world of online streaming, it took a while for Spotify to release its download for the offline features.

Spotify: Testing the market

Spotify released the feature in March of 2009, where they began offering music downloads to a select few countries, in the United Kingdom, France, and Spain. My hunch was that in doing so, they wanted to see if 'downloading' music and paying for it will be a performer to the product, unfortunately, it didn't work out too well, with the feature removed a mere 3 years later, in 2013, Users could purchase tracks from Spotify, which partnered with 7digital to incorporate the feature. The ability to purchase and download music tracks via the app was removed on 4 January 2013. A lot of people complained, but also a lot of people didn't use this feature, some features just don't stick after a few years, the market trends or behavior of a user and their preferences, changes and it's up to you as a product owner to ensure you listen to these changes and keep a close check on what competitors or similar services are doing.

Spotify's relentless experiments paid off, some didn't

Spotify decided that there were a few issues to tackle, could they have limits to free in order to convert to paid?

They brought out, a feature to address free users, limiting listening experiences which impose a penalty and can drawback negative or positive monetization strategy, the risk of losing the users were high and free users were limited to 10 hours of playback, they removed this eventually and started different strategies in a bid to win the free user base and year on year, the offer has been more and more favorable to giving free users what they want whilst making sure paid users were always excited.

Spotify included the listen to offline feature, and this was brilliant, following in the footsteps of Netflix whereas as a paying subscriber, you can download your favorite tv shows to watch whenever you don't have access to data, which was a godsend to customers. They got here only because they were transparent in their efforts, agile, and were not afraid to experiment with a variety of solutions in order for the right one to stick. To this day Spotify and its teams are self-organizing, accountable, and are in abundance of great ideas where they want to keep on innovating and I admire them for their relentless pursuit of keeping the customer and their artists happy.