Spotify: a Product Story Episode 5 - Transcript
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Spotify: A Product Story Episode 5 - Transcript You’ve just boarded a long haul flight. Your jacket’s in the overhead compartment, hand luggage stashed under the seat in front of you. Seatbelt on. Tray table stored. The plane taxis down the runway -- and you take off. You start to relax and lower your seat back. Then, you hear this from the cockpit: Ladies and gentlemen, this is your captain speaking, with an important message from our crew: we will now change engines, mid-flight. You may experience some turbulence as we lose some speed and even potentially some altitude… but we’re fairly certain it’s the right decision in the long run. Thank you for flying with us and hold on tight! Changing the engine mid-flight. It sounds crazy -- but this is essentially the position we found ourselves in at Spotify in 2013. This is Spotify: A Product Story, and I’m your host, Gustav Söderström. I head up product, engineering, data and design for Spotify. In this podcast, we’ll pull back the curtain on our biggest product launches. We’ll break down what worked, what didn’t, why Spotify ultimately succeeded, and how you can use the key lessons in product strategy that we’ve learned along the way. On today’s episode -- When Your Winning Bet Becomes Your Losing Bet -- we’ll explain how Spotify’s proprietary stack went from being our superpower to being our kryptonite, and just how close we came to crashing and burning. (01:47) From day one, Spotify was built to perform. Daniel Ek: I think it comes back to your DNA as the founder, and my DNA was I loved technology. And I loved technology even for technology's sake. 1 Spotify: A Product Story Episode 5 - Transcript That’s Spotify’s CEO, Daniel Ek. When he and his co-founder Martin Lorentzon started Spotify in the mid-2000s, peer-to-peer networking was the coolest tech around -- like the blockchain of its time. Disruptive and a little bit scary but potentially incredibly powerful. So, even before they figured out exactly what Spotify would do, they made a bet on developing the tech and they never looked back. Daniel Ek: We knew we wanted to build a company and again the role model at the time was Google, which had, you know, fantastic technology. And we were like, what could our sort of fantastic technology be? And that was the ambition of the company. Spotify’s fantastic technology was a hybrid client-server and peer-to-peer system -- technology that made it possible for the first time to stream music fast enough that people not only switched over to Spotify from downloading music illegally, they even started paying for music again. -- If you haven’t already heard them, now’s a good time to go back and listen to episodes 1 and 2 for the full story -- This feat of engineering -- the proprietary technology stack that let you listen to any song in the world in less than 500 ms -- was Spotify’s secret sauce -- the thing that made it succeed where so many others had failed. Until, one day, it wasn’t. Well, that’s not entirely true. In reality, it took several painful years for Spotify to fully outgrow its proprietary stack. A fact that Emil Fredriksson knows better than almost anyone. Emil Fredriksson: I walked in there on the first day, and it was just an empty, an empty building. And, started talking to the people there that I didn't know yet and assembling the office furniture and kind of like -- OK, so what do we do now? Where do we start? 2 Spotify: A Product Story Episode 5 - Transcript Emil has been Spotify’s Operations Director since 2008. While the rest of the company (all 5 of them) figured out how Spotify could leverage peer-to-peer technology, Emil oversaw the very first Spotify prototype -- a standard client-server set-up stashed in a closet. At least until it outgrew the apartment Daniel and Martin were using as Spotify HQ at the time. Emil Fredriksson: An apartment isn't built to have 10 or 20 computers running in the same place, so. You just can't plug more things in, you're going to trip the circuits. I remember once when I think the cleaners in the office had plugged in their vacuum to the wrong power socket and overloaded one of the circuits. So the servers had shut down. And Daniel was calling me and saying, there's all of these people saying that calling and text messaging and sending him Facebook messages or whatever that Spotify isn't working. So I had to jump in a taxi and go to the office. This was on a weekend -- and switched the circuit breakers back on and unplug the vacuum and try and get everything back up and running. As Spotify added the peer to peer technology and local caching that we described in episode 1, the central servers that Emil was responsible for only needed to serve as little as 10% of all the listening happening on Spotify and the system became much more fault tolerant as it could always fall back on peer to peer if the central servers failed. But even with that it was hard to keep up with the growth of Spotify, especially as the system still had some central components, such as the playlist system that easily got overloaded during peak usage. Emil Fredriksson: So what would happen was on Friday night, the people started to use Spotify more and more because there’s parties or people who were at home listening to music, and at Friday night, it would always fail, often the playlist system. And so what happened was I would get the alert and I would start calling the developers that knew how the playlist system worked and we would spend hours and hours on the Friday night trying to bring it back to a workable state. So looking back, you think like, well, why didn’t we fix it? Could we have done something to make it work better? But that was the reality at Spotify for me and for many of the developers -- it was putting out fires. So even thinking about building new features or strategy long term, that sort of thing, it just didn't have a space in our mind. We were just going from one week to the next. 3 Spotify: A Product Story Episode 5 - Transcript Emil went from managing one server to an apartment full of servers to traveling all over Europe and North America -- trying to lease space and hire teams on the ground as fast as possible in order to set up enough data centers to keep up with Spotify’s explosive growth. At the same time, Spotify’s user base was moving off of PCs and onto mobile devices -- so the peer-to-peer network that had made the desktop client so special in the beginning, was actually turning into a liability -- we couldn’t use it on mobile because it would drain people’s batteries, and use up all their data. Which resulted in more and more strain being put on our servers. Meanwhile, the rest of the internet had started to catch up. The pay off in terms of latency and reliability that came from running our own data centers diminished every day, as cloud computing got better, faster, and cheaper. Emil Fredriksson: So much time had passed that like that competitive edge is just like eroded for a number of years, like no one really even seemed to care that much about how -- I mean, obviously the product has to be really fast, but we weren't significantly faster than any of our competitors anymore, and that kind of is just table stakes. So that was very important in one of the faces of Spotify. It just wasn't that important. And it's just not technically that difficult to do anymore. Gustav Söderström : Exactly. What is important changes and controlling parts of the stack may be vital during a period of time, but then it turns from your biggest advantage to one of your biggest costs and you actually want to move on to figure out another part of the stack or of the business model that is still vital, that is underperforming or that has lots of opportunity left. You don't want to stay and spend the same amount of cost on the opportunity that isn't there anymore. Emil Fredriksson: Yeah, I think that's 100 percent true. And the challenge is that when you spent enough time to get into the nitty gritty details of doing something yourself, like zooming back out and realizing that this isn't the most important thing that I should be doing right now, that's like a personal challenge and not something that comes natural to humans, I believe, that's a fight that you have to take and really be purposeful about. Otherwise, it's so easy to just stay in your little bubble and continue iterating on your little problem that you've learned so much about and become so good at. 4 Spotify: A Product Story Episode 5 - Transcript (09:13) The reality is, it took us longer than it probably should have to accept that our data centers were becoming such a bottleneck. Partly because we were too attached to the “fantastic technology” that we originally pioneered and partly because -- at some point -- being in a constant state of crisis had become Emil and his team’s comfort zone.