Lessons from scaling Spotify: The science of product, taking risky bets, and how AI is already impacting the future of music | Gustav Söderström (Co-President, CPO, and CTO at Spotify)

**Gustav Söderström** (0:00)
The Internet sort of started with curation, often user curation. So you took something, some good, like people or books or music, and you digitized it and you put it online, and then you asked users to curate it. And that was your Facebook, Spotify, and so forth. And then after a while, the world switched from curation to recommendation, where instead of people doing that work, you had algorithms. And that was a big change. It required us and others to actually rethink the entire user experience, and sometimes the business model as well. And I think we're entering now is, we're going from your curation to recommendation to generation. And I suspect it will be as big of a shift that you will eventually have to rethink your products. We had to rethink the user interface and the experience for recommendation first era. And so what does that mean in the generative era? No one really knows yet.

**Lenny Rachitsky** (0:47)
Welcome to Lenny's Podcast, where I interview world-class product leaders and growth experts to learn from their hard-won experiences building and growing today's most successful products. Today, my guest is Gustav Söderström. Gustav is a product legend, and he's now the co-president, chief product, and chief technology officer at Spotify, where he's responsible for Spotify's global product and technology strategy, and oversees the product design data and engineering teams at the company.
I've had Gustav on my wish list of dream guests to have on this podcast since the day I launched the podcast, and I'm so happy we made it happen. In our conversation, we dig into what Gustav has learned about taking big bets and what to do when they don't work out, how Spotify moved away from squads, and how they structure their teams now, how AI is already impacting their product, and also the future of music generated by AI, also why all great products need to pull some kind of magic trick, how accurately succession represents Swedish business culture, and his hilarious analogy of peeing in your pants.
Enjoy this episode with Gustav Söderström after a short word from our sponsors.
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Gustav, welcome to the podcast.

**Gustav Söderström** (4:10)
Thanks for having me Lenny, it's a pleasure to be here.

**Lenny Rachitsky** (4:13)
It's my pleasure to have you on. So at this point, you've been at Spotify for over 14 years, which is a rare feat in the tech world.