It’s way better than spending months building a monolithic solution and just crossing your fingers that it works. This kind of rapid experimentation at scale makes it possible to make lots of small bets, then roll out the winners and cheaply discard the losers. Recently, our team came up with a new strategy and deployed it successfully to a small percentage of our audience-soon, we’ll be rolling it out to everyone. Are they referring to the Fifth Harmony song ‘Work From Home’? Or are they asking to play the Rihanna track ‘Work’ from the speaker they’ve named ‘Home’? Figuring out all the possibilities is a puzzle that lies at the intersection of linguistics, technology, and personalization, and we’re always trying to get better at it. For instance, imagine that someone asks a Voice speaker to ‘play work from home’. One of the fun challenges in Voice is that natural language is inherently ambiguous, meaning that the same statement can often have multiple meanings. Or I could be meeting with other product people to think about our overall strategy and plan out the weeks, months and quarters ahead. I could be sitting down with our engineers to figure out a thorny technical problem. And on any given morning, I could be getting together with our data scientists and user researchers to discuss a feature we’re building and how people are reacting to it. As a Group Product Manager, I keep track of the projects we have in flight, the explorations we’re doing and the strategy we’re trying to pursue, whether that’s broadly in the Personalization department or specifically in Voice. I work in the part of Spotify that builds human + AI experiences to help listeners discover music they’ll love, and our team figures out how to do this via Voice assistants in our app or on voice-controlled speakers. When I get to the office, I have a quick breakfast then get down to business.

It’s a great opportunity to put myself in the shoes of someone who doesn’t work at Spotify, listen with fresh ears, and figure out how to improve things for everyone in the outside world. And I spend that time bouncing around between various streaming and podcast platforms on my phone-half to entertain myself, half as market research. I live in Newton, Massachusetts, which means a half-hour ride into work. Time to wake up, grab a shower and get my train. Here, he talks us through a typical day and explains why he’s still so excited to be part of the team… Ajay is a Group Product Manager on the Voice team and has worked in our Boston office ever since it was set up.

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