How Spotify builds products

The Ship It stage ends when the product is available to all users.

Our core philosophy is: We create innovative products while managing risk by prototyping early and cheaply.

The biggest risk is building the wrong product - a product that doesn’t delight our users, or doesn’t improve success metrics such as user acquisition, user retention, etc. We call this “product risk". The 4-stage model helps us drive down risk and get products out the door quickly.

We ensure that our products go from being great at launch to becoming amazing, by relentlessly tweaking after launch.

The Build It stage ends when management and the squad jointly believe that this product fulfills the basic narrative and is good enough to start releasing to real users.

We don’t launch on date, we launch on quality.

The Think It stage ends when management and the squad jointly believe that this product is worth building.

The flow: Think It = figure out what type of product we are building and why. Build It = create a minimum viable product that is ready for real users. Ship It = gradually roll out to 100% of all users, while measuring and improving. Tweak It = Continuously improve the product. This isn't really an end state; the product stays in Tweak It until it i... See more