Product Management: Going from Meh to Awesome

In this talk at Mind the Product in 2015, Shiva Rajaraman, a former director of product at Google (YouTube) who moved to Spotify, shares lessons on taking a product from meh to awesome.

Relish your weird superfans: if you don’t have them, you’re probably already dead, and you can’t win with a neutral response. Every now and then, push your product to its limits. When YouTube live streamed Felix Baumgartner’s 2012 space jump, the platform nearly fell over, but it generated 8% of all internet traffic that day.

Don’t build individual features; build platforms that cover many use cases. YouTube solved rights management with a form of digital fingerprinting that now also feeds into the Billboard 100. Make your platform an ecosystem, and ask whether new economies and businesses exist because of what you’ve made. Finally, hack the whole stack, not just your software, for example by innovating on content, as Spotify did by turning playlists into weekly scheduled shows like Discover Weekly.