Daniel Ek

It's like horrible.

Like, how could he say this?

But I also realized that that was an emotional response.

So again, I wasn't fully convinced that this was true, but I sort of went back and said, okay, well, you know what?

I'm going to give you three months where I don't do the product reviews.

And then we evaluate how this worked.

And lo and behold, he actually did a great job.

And so the product team was much happier.

You know, he was making more of the decisions without me.

I wasn't meddling in.

There wasn't two different people deciding what worked, but it was really him.

And ever since that moment, you know, I don't really run product anymore in the traditional.

I'm involved in the product and he solicits feedback from me all the time, but I don't run the product meetings.

And I say that because what happened for me was a real setback, not just in sort of that moment, but it also sort of like, oh, wait a minute.

So what am I really, you know, what's my value at then in this company?

And it took me a while, and I realized that all of a sudden, hmm, actually, you know what?

That won't be it, but maybe I can add value in this place.

And I sort of oscillated to this different place in the company, which was much closer to understanding the creator and spending more time with the content people, et cetera.

And so my product feedback ended up being

And this is the dynamic that's quite unique to Spotify in that we have these two stakeholders.