From Twitter Spaces to Independent Artists: Leading Org-Based Innovation | Pablo Jablonski

**Pablo Jablonski** (0:00)
The thing that I've not only taken from Twitter at United Masters, but just have always believed my entire time as an engineering leader is that you can't build effective teams if the mission statement is the technology. The mission statement has to be the people that we're serving and the customer problem that we're solving.
That has to be where you start, and you have to build a team of people on engineering and cross-functionally that really are passionate about solving that problem for those people. That has to be where we start.

**Conor Bronsdon** (0:35)
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We are back on Dev Interrupted from New York City. This is your host, Conor Bronsdon, and I'm very excited to be joined by Pablo Jablonski. Pablo, welcome to the show.

**Pablo Jablonski** (1:22)
Thank you. Thanks for having me.

**Conor Bronsdon** (1:24)
You are the former head of engineering for Twitter Spaces. You're also the VP of engineering today at United Masters. You have a fascinating background. I'm really excited to dig into some of your background and also the work you're doing today. Maybe we'll get some hot takes out of you, I think.
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Pablo, let's dive right in though. I think a lot of folks will know you from your work at Twitter on this very high-profile product feature that came out with Spaces. I have to admit, I'm personally a fan. I got a podcast, Mike. Come on, go ahead and do it. How did that come about?

**Pablo Jablonski** (1:59)
Yeah, so great question. So my journey at Twitter actually started with Periscope, which is a live video application which we started in 2015

**Conor Bronsdon** (2:08)
I remember Periscope.

**Pablo Jablonski** (2:09)
Yeah, so that's where this all started. And so Periscope was this idea that people could use their video to...
Basically, the one sentence line was view the world through someone else's eyes. The idea is anyone could pick up their phone, point at something and the world could see it. That was kind of where we were coming from. And it basically baked an entire product around video, live video specifically. And it was very interesting and very cool. And we got a lot of learnings from that.
And about three years after we launched it, we launched this kind of secret project within Twitter that we code named Kaleidoscope. And the idea was that periscope is video, kaleidoscope is anything, right? What are all of the different forms that this live technology could take if we were to remove video from the equation?
What's the whole equation of things that we could do?
And we spent about a year prototyping different ideas and audio emerged as the most promising next step. We found that audio was a much more comfortable way for people to engage in conversations than video was. We actually launched what we called audio-only broadcasts on Periscope about a year prior and found a lot of people were doing them because they didn't want to be on camera. So we built a bunch of prototypes and we found this idea of these audio rooms where people could really talk using their voice as a really compelling idea that really took that to be the prototype that we wanted to take next. That was the evolution of Periscope, the next step we wanted to take. It was towards the end of 2021, was basically where we decided that we wanted to take that prototype and actually make it a reality and we built Spaces. We took about four months at Twitter to take that prototype to a beta stage and actually launch it to the whole user base at Twitter. We actually had a really successful product there. We had a lot of really interesting use cases and a lot of really amazing interactions that we found from different people to use the product. It really proved to be a new way for Twitter users to talk to each other, which is really the point of Twitter to begin with, was for people to talk to each other.