Connecting fans to creators at Spotify (Dariusz Dziuk, Product Lead, Spotify)

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In this episode, Dariusz Dziuk, product lead for music expression at Spotify, discusses his journey in product management, the balance between art and science in the field, and the innovative process behind creating dynamic cover art for artists.

He shares insights on how the team at Spotify connects creators with fans, the importance of validating assumptions through real artist engagement, and the metrics used to measure success. Dariusz emphasises the need to listen to artists and adapt to their creative needs while exploring future directions for Spotify's artist tools.


Featured Links: Follow Dariusz on LinkedIn | Dariusz's website | Spotify | '#mtpcon @ Pendomonium 2024 Encore' recap feature

Chapters
- 00:00 Introduction to Dariusz Dziuk and Spotify's Product Management
- 03:09 The Dichotomy of Art and Science in Product Management
- 05:58 Exploring the Open Brief: Connecting Creators and Fans
- 09:09 Finding the Niche: The Journey to Dynamic Cover Art
- 11:57 Validating Assumptions: The Role of Artists in Product Development
- 17:45 Measuring Success: The Impact of Dynamic Cover Art
- 23:54 Future Directions: Evolving the Artist Experience on Spotify
- 28:05 Conclusion and Key Takeaways

Key takeaways

Episode Transcript

Randy Silver: 0:00
Hello, I'm Randy Silver and you're listening to the product experience or, even better, maybe you're watching this episode, which would be cool, because this week I'm talking to Dariusz about his work as product lead for music expression at Spotify, and this was an amazing conversation. You know, in our work, 99% of the time I'm coaching people to be clear on what users will do with their work, but in Dariusz's case, it's the exact opposite. The question was how his users would surprise him.

Lily Smith: 0:36
The Product Experience Podcast is brought to you by Mind, the Product part of the Pendo family. Every week we talk to inspiring product people from around the globe.

Randy Silver: 0:46
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Randy Silver: 1:16
Hey, we're here live at Pandemonium in Raleigh, North Carolina. I've got a wonderful guest for the podcast today. I'm here talking to Dariusz. He was on stage yesterday and had one of the most. Today. I'm here talking to Dariusz. He was on stage yesterday and had one of the most fun talks I've seen. He had the best music of any presentation I've ever seen. Welcome, how are you doing Well?

Dariusz Dziuk: 1:33
thanks for having me, Randy. It's great to be here. I'm doing very well. Had a great time yesterday.

Randy Silver: 1:38
Fantastic, so give us a little bit of an introduction for anyone who wasn't lucky enough to see you on stage here. How did you get into product in the first place and what do you do these days?

Dariusz Dziuk: 1:48
What do I do these days? So, first of all, I have been with Spotify for 12 years now, which is, I think, quite a tenure in the tech industry standards. I'm originally from Poland and at one point I discovered this company, spotify. They were operating from Stockholm, sweden, and I felt like, yeah, I'll be interested in working for them. I applied as an engineer, so I did front-end development initially. They offered me the job, which was like a very fun moment in my life.

Dariusz Dziuk: 2:14
I went there, moved to Sweden, did a couple of years of front-end coding and I didn't even know that product management is a thing when I was moving there. But I recognized that there is a handful of individuals that have a very fun job. They seem to be very passionate about trying to build something to make our customers' life better and so on, and I was very intrigued by that and I asked around hey, what do they do? They do product and I made my way. I convinced my leadership to give me a try and I transitioned after a couple of years to product management and I've been doing it now for, I think, eight to nine years and for some reason I've been always appointed to do these zero to one products. So the company trusted me in just putting me in an environment where we don't have a lot of things well-defined and they hope that me, together with the team, can come up with new propositions and do some innovation work.

Dariusz Dziuk: 3:16
And I've been working on a lot of different projects over the years at Spotify, and just recently I moved to the US, to New York, where I'm working on the artist sites of our proposition. So we have a product called FFF Artists, which is a web app and a mobile app that you as an artist or the team that is working with you and the label can just do fun stuff on Spotify can see how your music is doing, and that's sort of the area that I'm looking at. Music is doing and that's sort of the area that I'm looking at. So, thinking about helping artists express themselves better, bring more art to the world that's my domain right now.

Randy Silver: 3:51
Fantastic and we're going to talk a bit about how you brought one of these features to market, how you developed the thing, the moving cover, art for the video loops, but part of your talk, before we get into the specifics of that, you opened your talk yesterday talking about the debate within the product circles about whether what we do is art or science, and there's a dichotomy around it. So what is that dichotomy for us and where does product management actually fall on that scale?

Dariusz Dziuk: 4:19
So I think it's just very interesting If you think about product management as a discipline overall. First of when I was first of all, I didn't know about product. Why didn't I know about product? Because there's not that much curriculum out there about, hey, this is what product management is, and you go to school and you know university and study product management and eventually you make a career in it. Most people that I know that are successful in product management and they have careers in it. They come from a different place.

Dariusz Dziuk: 4:45
So there's just like something about a discipline that make it sort of a very important part of what we do in software or what we do in consumer products and goods and stuff like that. That it's intangible enough for the academia not be able to talk about it in a very structured way. And I've been obviously reflecting about it as someone who moved to product management. It's like how do I get good at it? What are the tools that I should be learning about? And throughout the years I've discovered a lot of different tools and a lot of them were falling on that side of science, on the art to science spectrum, for example, multivariant testing, a-b testing. I mean it's literally a scientific method. So you take tools that are quantifiable in nature and you just try to apply it to you know, to your day-to-day work. So you get like extremely strong evidence that what you're building makes sense.

Dariusz Dziuk: 5:41
But what I realized is that you know a lot of decisions that we're making day to day. You're never really getting these like hard answers that this is going to work. This is not going to work and it requires something else, and something that is much more difficult to teach others and something that is also very difficult to learn. And this is what I would say is like the art part of for, like, management. We obviously also work a lot with design. This is the part where actual art happens.

Dariusz Dziuk: 6:07
We have designers designing beautiful experiences, but I've been like reflecting about how can I get more structured and better at that part of sort of our jobs that is not that well defined, and I was lucky enough, you know, to be working on a product that has something to do with art, and I'm just reflecting a lot and what I realized is that, in terms of our product community, we don't talk often about it. We usually talk about the parts that are well-defined, better defined, and I felt like, yeah, maybe we should just talk a little bit about the part that is not as easy to define, is a little bit more artistic, and the talk that I gave at the conference was really trying to capture some of my learnings that I hope that I can share with others as well. But at the same time, it's difficult because, you know, because there is a bit of a magic there that sometimes is just not possible to explain.

Randy Silver: 7:00
So let's set the scene for this one. You had a fairly unique brief and I'm curious about how a brief like this is even generated and comes to you. I mean, it's evident from the way you're talking that zero to one is the right space for you. But a brief. I'm going to quote the brief exactly Figure out a way for Spotify to better connect creators and fans. That's not the kind of thing we usually get. We usually get something that is a lot more. Do it this way, and here's our definition of success. How does a brief like that come to you in the first place?

Dariusz Dziuk: 7:32
So again, I was like very lucky to get a brief like that because it was such an open and it can you know context for us just to explore. I have to like credit my leadership at the time. So the idea was that at a time at Spotify we were working in this kind of a structure where we had a lot of teams owning a specific subset of the experience. So you look at the app, it feels coherent, it feels like something that was designed by a single person but it's actually I don't know 12 different teams working on specific features. So we had a team working on playlists, we had a team working on the homepage and you know they had their metrics. The playlist team is looking into how can we have more people create playlists so they have this local KPI for them. And the leadership at the time felt like we might be missing out on some innovation because of the sort of remit nature of the ownership that these things have. So if we have a team that is thinking about the playlist or the artist page or the homepage, you know maybe we're missing out on some opportunities that fall in between the cracks of that ownership. It was a feeling. So they wanted to see if we can unlock some new opportunities. And the way they've done it is that they created a team, an innovation lab that didn't own any specific features. So we didn't have like a sense of mission to evolve like a one part of the experience towards a specific goal. We were like very free to explore and yeah, it's like hey, go out and figure out some cool things to build. And we said that's amazing, that's a very fun job to have, by the way, but we need some guidance here. Like how do we navigate that vast space of all the possibilities? And at the time we were increasingly thinking so I come from the consumer experience part of Spotify. So we were mostly thinking about how users use the app today and like every day, you know what features do they use and so on. But we were increasingly thinking about Spotify more of a marketplace proposition.

Dariusz Dziuk: 9:28
We just launched at the time Spotify for Artists, so the first sort of product for creators where you could check your stats, how your music is doing, and we were thinking, ok, so if Spotify is a marketplace and we think about it as a marketplace problem, how could you make Spotify a better marketplace? So that was kind of like a theme at the company at the time. And how do you make a marketplace better in general, like any kind of a marketplace? Well, you look at all of the players in the marketplace. You look at the suppliers, you look at the consumers and you look at the platform owners, which is us in this specific case.

Dariusz Dziuk: 10:01
So the success of a marketplace is having all of the players more successful in it. So if you have a specific outcome as a supplier, if we increase the likelihood of you having better outcomes, that's good for suppliers. So if you're Airbnb, finding liquidity for your apartment, that's success. Right. If you're a consumer, what is success for you? And in case of Spotify, it was just finding great new music and connecting better with creators. How can we make that happen? And then, what is the success for Spotify as a platform? Well, we get better at matchmaking as suppliers with consumers and we grow right. So that was like the framework, so we were just given that.

Randy Silver: 10:40
But there's so many different ways you can approach this. You could decide to connect them. You know better able given that, but there's so many different ways you can approach this. You could decide to connect better able to buy merch from your favorite artists, finding tour dates, messaging and things like that. You went in a very specific direction. Is that where you started in looking at cover art, or how did you get to that as your specific area?

Dariusz Dziuk: 11:00
So that's a great question because we actually explored all of this, because of how broad the brief was. The first question that we had was like, how do we find that niche that we think is valuable to invest in? And because it was also an innovation studio, we also asked ourselves how do we organize ourselves to be efficient in finding that niche? And what we did is that we decided to constrain ourselves to run weekly sprints. Obviously, you know IDEO, design Thinking, google's Design Sprint, so we took that sort of like format to structure our work. But we decided to have complete weekly sprints and after the end of the week, on Fridays, we concluded with some validation of these ideas and then the week after, we started with a completely new idea. We concluded we'd do some validation of these ideas and then the week after, we started with a completely new idea.

Dariusz Dziuk: 11:47
So we explored how many of these did you do? We did at least 12. So that's three months, I guess. So we did three months of explorations and there was all the different kinds of ideas. We looked at social features, we looked at merch, we looked at the album. We wanted to reinvent the album, for example. And you know, and there was a lot of compelling ideas, but for some reason, when we explored that specific cover art, I think we found something that felt to us realistic enough to invest in, but also, I think, bold enough to do something new in the world, and artistic. Obviously, we're pitching all of these ideas to our leadership on a weekly basis and they were giving us feedback, but the idea that won, that we decided to invest in, I think, won because people felt like this is something they want to exist essentially, and it's not very businessy, right, no, but it's a great story, but it's really interesting.

Randy Silver: 12:46
You've got a leadership team that says we want something bold and new and interesting. We know the area it's in and we're going to fund this team to keep trying things until we decide, using whatever metric they use to ultimately make that decision. It may have been gut, from what it sounds like, that this was the one that they wanted you to take forward first. Anyway, that's fantastic.

Dariusz Dziuk: 13:08
I mean I loved it and I talk about it in the talk as well because this was essentially a new content format. So the fun thing about content formats is that when you come up with a content format, well, the content doesn't exist. It needs to be created, right. So typically you try to have some sort of a form of in-market validation and in software you are quite often able to approximate your final solution in a small form, in a form of MVP. You build the feature, you launch it to a small number of users, you see what they do and if you see sort of the signals that are positive, you continue investing in it.

Dariusz Dziuk: 13:45
In our case, and I think in the case of a lot of content products in general, that MVP is very difficult because the content doesn't exist. So we want creators to do something and the only way to really validate it in the market is to let them do it. So at the end of the day, this was the kind of a project where you really have to make a bet on, based on just the fit to the organization's vision. And you know, looking at the marketplace again, do we think it's going to help the marketplace participants to be more successful, but also because we wanted to see more art in the world.

Randy Silver: 14:22
So that was like one of the bigger motivators as well. So the approach you took involved going back to first principles and identifying assumptions. Tell me a little bit about this approach. What did you actually do? And let's use the example the final thing that you went forward with, which was the dynamic cover art. So what were the assumptions that you were putting in?

Dariusz Dziuk: 14:39
place, so I talk about it in the presentation as well. But I was heavily inspired by this talk by Rob W, who is the board game designer for Hasbro at the time, and he talked about the Hasbro brainstorming technique. And I think you know, if you're in the business of games building games, video games or like board games I think you're in the business of creating ideas that are sticky right, that are easy for people to talk about. So if I want to recommend a game for you, you will ask me what is this game about? And I have to be able to explain it in very simple terms. And so he talked about you know his creative practice and what Hasbro is doing at the time, which is, you know, just like looking at all the assumptions that we're making about a specific game games overall, the players that are playing the games and they're just like listing all of them down and asking themselves is this like an assumption that we can challenge? But I think what is interesting in this exercise is that while you're writing down all the assumptions, you might recognize that some of the assumptions were never challenged for no reason at all.

Dariusz Dziuk: 15:44
So when we did the exercise and we look at what Spotify looks like and what our designers are designing against. We realized that they always represent the music using the cover art, which is static file, which is a square. And it's a thing you know that we've been always doing designing digital music products and we were never thinking too much about it. But we were asking ourselves, hey, why is it a square? And we realized that it doesn't need to be a square. And if you would design a music product now, not thinking about the history of recorded music and the distribution that came prior, you'll probably design it differently. We talked a lot about Gen Z and their listening habits being or, like the internet habits being very different. They're used to discovering content in a very different way. You know, does a static cover art, which is a square, make sense to them? And we realized maybe not, because you know it's an artifact of a bygone era. That was a great artifact to put a physical product in.

Randy Silver: 16:43
Oh God, you're making me feel old.

Dariusz Dziuk: 16:45
I remember those and you know, and our younger audiences they don't go to a record store. They've never been to a record store. Unfortunately, it's a good vibe to go to a record store. Maybe they're going to have a comeback. And we felt like yeah. So we were making all of these assumptions, kind of like automatically. We were never challenging them, but we could challenge them. So we asked ourselves, if you design a way to visually represent the music that you're delivering to a digital streaming platform today and have no constraints, what that would look like. And that's how we ended up with this visual that is made for fit for the digital distribution. So I think the big realization came from the fact that we were looking at a supply chain and we just always took it for granted this is the supply chain, this is how the music gets delivered to us. But what if we change some of the things?

Randy Silver: 17:31
So it's for each assumption going through and saying but what if?

Dariusz Dziuk: 17:34
What if? Yeah, but also I have to say that it was possible for us to do it because we already had a scale to do it. Because if you would be like a new entrant in that space and you're like, hey, we're going to completely reinvent, you know how you deliver music and how you consume music Maybe you wouldn't necessarily have that power to convince enough suppliers to do it and then to have enough of a user base to participate in it so they see value in that. But at Spotify we had that scale, so I think we're able to do it as well.

Randy Silver: 18:03
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Randy Silver: 19:10
We're in more today at pendoio slash podcast, but if you're taking a design thinking approach, to this. This is almost the first diamond, which is the problem we want to solve. Yeah, now you're going to move into the second phase of building and testing, and it's not enough to just do this in the ivory tower of your office. How did you work with artists to see how they would respond?

Dariusz Dziuk: 19:37
to this. Yeah. So this is, I think, my biggest lesson about like building products for creatives in general, because our designers, you know, when we came up with what the format would be like, they started mocking their own ideas and they're very creative and they did beautiful visualizations of the music that they, you know, listen to. So we felt like, oh yeah, you know, if they can do it, like the art is going to do something equally fun. But we didn't really know if that's going to happen. Like we didn't know exactly how artists would do it. We were wondering should we just ask them to do something specific? Tell them what it's going to happen? We didn't know exactly how artists would do it. We were wondering should we just ask them to do something specific, tell them what it's going to be good for, and so on and so on. So we have all these different ideas and I went to the user research team and we say, hey, we want to kind of figure out if this is creatively interesting for artists. Can you help us validate this? And the thing that you should never tell the user research team is how to do specific piece of research, which I did at the time. Hey, can we get like five artists and you know, talk to them and maybe have them in a room and, you know, design something for us, just to see if we're going to get like a creative output. The user research team prefers to get a problem statement and they're going to get back to you with a methodology. So they go back to us and say like, yeah, we can totally do it, but you're not going to get that validation that you're looking for and that was based on the foundational research, obviously, and the understanding of the domain specifically. But they said, for art to really be meaningful, the stakes need to be real. Okay, so they have to do it for a real audience, essentially, and you're just going to get like an exercise. You know that is not going to be meaningful instead. So they told us I think you should launch this feature and we can work with you know small number of artists to begin with and we can ask them sort of to participate in this pilot program and just see what's going to happen. But they're going to get real stakes in it and they're going to put their you know creativity into it and they're going to put their creativity into it. So that's what we did. Our leadership was okay with it. We did some estimates that it's not going to break Spotify because it's just going to be a small number of artists. And we opened it up and we started getting the initial.

Dariusz Dziuk: 21:36
The feature is called Canvas. So we started getting the initial canvases and they were always surprising us creatively. We never thought that they could do something like that. We had an artist washed out. It's a musician in the chill wave genre. It's a very specific genre. I love this and the artist came back with a full album and the canvases, where every canvas was made for every track in a completely different visual style. So video footage, stop motion, animation, and it was a completely, you know, independent decision and we were just like, so in awe, you know what that could become, and I think that was like the validation that this really makes sense.

Randy Silver: 22:23
But you were talking about the marketplace approach earlier, so you've now validated, using this as an example. I'm sure there are plenty of other examples, but you're validating that this is perceived value for the artist, that they're interested in it, but you're looking for value for the listener and value for the platform. Yeah, how are you measuring those? How do you know that this is?

Dariusz Dziuk: 22:43
successful. So at a very small scale that we started. We really didn't have the statistical power to be able to prove any of these things in a quant way, but eventually at some point and I was not involved in this project at that time because we incubated it, but then the team that is working on the artist tools actually took it to market. So they've implemented the whole methodology to kind of validate what it does to the platform and are we meeting the marketplace goals. But at a certain point they achieved enough scale. So they achieved enough content volume, so enough.

Dariusz Dziuk: 23:23
But if a user started interacting with this content and there was enough moving covers, for us to be able to measure this effect and obviously now we're moving from art to science. We had a holdback group so we were able to measure the effect of it and we have seen the evidence of this driving positive outcomes for the two sides of the marketplace. So for the artists, that people were interacting with the track more, so they were saving it more, they were sharing it more and act of sharing. It's the ultimate evidence that you're really into that piece of art because you want to share it with others. So we're able to go back to creators and we could have like a marketing claim that this is what you're going to achieve if you invest in this specific format. Yeah, and then on the consumer side, we saw that people are engaging with their music more and it helps with discovery.

Dariusz Dziuk: 24:08
Again, we didn't have enough coverage yet for this to become like a very native to Spotify part of discovering music, but seven years later, we're actually able to build an experience that is foreground first. So that cover art was an experience that was supposed to be helping people who are listening to Spotify in the background. And when you have the moment of like, hey, what is this, what is this song, then you're glancing at your device and that moment of you glancing at the device. We're going to enhance it with showing you a little bit of art so you have a better connection. But it was still very much designed. That's why it's also like a short loop. It was designed to sort of elevate the background listening moment.

Randy Silver: 24:44
So it's a delighter in the key yeah exactly.

Dariusz Dziuk: 24:47
Yeah, a very powerful delighter, as we've learned. But now having just like, I don't know the exact number, but hundreds of thousands of these cover arts are moving, operating in a digital space that also has evolved, and people are consuming content on the internet very differently. Short video platforms have emerged. Tiktok is massively popular. The up and coming generation of music listeners are used to different ways of discovering content as well, so we're able to take that content and build a discovery feed around it. So it has a mechanism where you just like swipe through songs and we're showing you the visual and we're playing the music, and for those users who are like into this specific format, it's obviously like an opt-in experience. We see that they're discovering more music. So, again going back to the marketplace, we're in the business of matchmaking and people are discovering more music and they're becoming bigger fans of the artists that they're discovering. So that is success to us.

Randy Silver: 25:47
And now you're moving out of the zero to one space. Now you're moving into the maturation space. And so what do you do? It's probably not your team anymore, but what do you guys do as a response to this? You can start looking at this from lots of different ways. You can say let's create an AI tool set that allows artists to generate images more. Or let's find ways to do more sharing. How do you know where to go next in this?

Dariusz Dziuk: 26:13
Going back to first principles, right? Yeah, I think so. I think a Gen AI is obviously such an interesting space. But one thing that was very interesting to me with this specific project is that a couple of years ago somebody shared a job ad from one of the music labels that was hiring a visual designer to create these visuals for the roster that the label was representing, and I was just so happy because we felt like you know, that's definitely validation.

Randy Silver: 26:41
That's definitely definitely validation.

Dariusz Dziuk: 26:42
We're creating jobs here. But why would you hire a visual designer? Right, because you also want that expertise in the visual expression. And we see a lot of artists doing DIY style content. So we see artists recording selfie videos, you know, using their fonts, and they're uploading this and it works for a lot of different use cases. But then we see a lot of artists who are investing in collaborating with visual designers.

Dariusz Dziuk: 27:09
There is a musician from San Francisco, tycho. It's instrumental music, primarily electronic instrumental music. It's very fun, but the leader of that band has a visual design background and he was a person who really embraced that format in a in a in an interesting way, because of his creative visual background and his connection to the visual graphic design space. He asked his fans and you know, people who he knows from the community to share visuals and to create graphics that the music inspires, and he took them all and he created these little like reels out of these visuals and he put them as canvas as well. So he essentially allowed other visual designers to find a new channel for, you know, for just like broadcasting their creativity.

Dariusz Dziuk: 28:05
So what are the options out there? I think, primarily to us. What is important is that we meet that need. So you, as a musician, you should feel proud of the music that you're putting out there, and the visual is a companion piece to it, and we should be facilitating all of the ways to make that more accessible and easier. And what is the solution? We're going to find out, yeah.

Randy Silver: 28:29
I think we've got time for one more question, dariusz, and I'm really curious. This is an amazing story. We've gone into it in a lot of ways, but you've since moved on into other stuff. I'm assuming that you're working on yes. How has this influenced your approach? What have you taken with you? How have you built on it?

Dariusz Dziuk: 28:44
So I am now working on the artist side specifically After moving to New York. We built Spotify for Artists in New York, and so I'm actually thinking about the problem space much more. In a lot of ways it's actually a B2B product In that sense, obviously with a super heavy sort of consumer sort of counterpart to it. But the takeaway you know, the biggest assumptions that we were making was about whether Art is going to do it or not, and that was the hard part to validate and that was the hard part to really design around and build. And the takeaway for me is that if you have a marketplace product and you're bootstrapping your marketplace, you have what is called the cold start problem, right, so you need to have enough kind of inventory for the marketplace to click to work.

Dariusz Dziuk: 29:31
I think Andrew Chen, he wrote a book about it called the Cold Start Problem and he talks a lot about it. But he says in the book that in marketplace products or platforms, when you're trying to solve for the cost of problem, the part to focus on is the supply side. And that is the hard side because, going back to Airbnb as an example, your stakes as a homeowner, I think, are bigger than your stakes as a traveler in general. So trying to optimize, initially at least, for making sure that the product is as best as you can for the suppliers, it's probably going to increase the likelihood of your marketplace being more successful. So, on Spotify, what artists put out there? This is their livelihood and this is you know what they do, and we always want to make sure that we listen to these needs and we listen to what they want to achieve and we make sure that we build a product that helps them. And if I would be taking bets, I would put the bets first on the artist side and then, if we're creating something wild and crazy and maybe risky, on the consumer side, I think we can do it, but we should always listen to the supplier.

Dariusz Dziuk: 30:45
That's my takeaway.

Randy Silver: 30:46
Fantastic, makes a lot of sense. Thank you, I've really enjoyed this chat, erich. Thanks, randy, I appreciate it.

Lily Smith: 31:02
The Product Experience hosts are me, Lily Smith, host by night and chief product officer by day.

Randy Silver: 31:09
And me Randy Silver also host by night, and I spend my days working with product and leadership teams, helping their teams to do amazing work.

Lily Smith: 31:18
Louron Pratt is our producer and Luke Smith is our editor.

Randy Silver: 31:22
And our theme music is from product community legend Arne Kittler's band POW. Thanks to them for letting us use their track. Thank you.