Comment by eries
6 hours ago
I don't have the link in front of me, but someone who used to work at Spotify wrote a really nice reflection about this change through the lens of incorruptible over on LinkedIn. If someone can find it and post it here, that'd be great. If not, I'll try to remember to come back and post it later.
I think these changes very rarely have to do with what customers want shifting, but when people say "the market," they are often confused about whether they're talking about customers or our financial markets. Frankly, it's far more often for this kind of correction to originate in the pressure from financial markets than any other single source.
Easy to see how a North Star (aligned with mission or not) may have shifted this over time. “Hours listened” as a metric. I’ll be interested to read this and see if you mention measuring the rights things as a way to stay on mission.
I'm not just talking about where the initial pressure comes from, but the effects of the changes. I guess the question becomes about how easily these layers get disentangled. E.g. things investors like that then result in lower sales? Things that result in greater sales but that the customers don't actually like?
Naively of course it seems like investors don't like it when sales go down, so there'd be an extremely tight link between financial market and product market feedback. But I imagine you disagree, that this breaks down easily and creates problems?
Just look at the evidence. Investor holding periods are going down, and there's less and less correlation between value creation and stock price movements.
The LinkedIn post: https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/incorruptible-spotify-brendan...