Spotify Podcasts

I was recently listening to the Invest Like the Best interview with Daniel Elk, the CEO of Spotify, and was stuck by the dissonance between the theoretical articulation of the product vision and direction and my lived experience with the product, specifically as it relates to podcasts.

While Daniel coherently walked through the Clayton Christensen "job to be done" framework (also popular with the instagram founders in an earlier episode), I was shocked about how poorly the Spotify product team seems to have adopted this lesson in their product development strategy.

Specifically, while there's an overlap between the times I'm hiring spotify to find and curate music and when I'm hiring spotify to find and curate podcasts, after that initial decision, it feels like the team retrofitted the existing spotify app and user experience without critically thinking through how users actually want to interact with a podcast-specific experience.

In particular, I was shocked to see that they tried to smash podcasts directly into the existing Spotify app rather than having a podcast-oriented application geared specifically towards podcast users. As an episodic medium with repeat consumption and curation, podcasts are just very different than traditional music. Additionally, once I've decided to listen to a podcast, the likelihood of me wanting to listen to music is extremely low - podcast-specific search, prioritization and discovery is much worse when mixed up with musical mediums (https://community.spotify.com/t5/Live-Ideas/Podcasts-Split-out-podcasts-into-separate-app/idi-p/4938692).

This is the approach Facebook has taken with Messenger, and Gmail took with Inbox; as a user, I get a tailored experience without being distracted but content unrelated to my general user-intent.

As a final aside, while I understand the complexity of the b2b partnership side, as a consumer, if spotify is trying to move into podcasts, the lack of audible / deep integration with books-on-tape feels like another way to control the user experience.