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.Their products are loved by users and artists and spreadvirally they have over 20 million active users, 5 million paying subscribers,and are growing fast.For example, it took roughly a year to go from zeroto 1 million paying subscribers in the United States, a foreign market withplenty of established players.The products are designed to be easy, personal, and fun.Here s theparadox, though: Successful companies like Spotify only want to deliverproducts that people love.But they don t know if people love a productuntil they ve delivered it.So how do they do it? This section will provide a high-level summary ofSpotify s approach to product development.SummaryOur core philosophy is:�%We create innovative products while managing risk by prototypingearly and cheaply.�%We don t launch on date; we launch on quality.�%We ensure that our products go from being great at launch to be-coming amazing by relentlessly tweaking after launch.All major product initiatives go through four stages: Think It, BuildIt, Ship It, and Tweak It. Figure 4-3 illustrates the flow from idea toproduct and what comes out of each stage along the way.15.Disclaimer: Like all models, this is a simplification of reality.We don t alwaysfollow this process to the letter, and there is a lot of local variation.But this articleshould give you the general idea.The material in this article is based on discussions with Gustav S�derstr�m, OskarSt�l, Olof Carlson, and their internal documents and frameworks such as the ThinkIt, Build It, Ship It, Tweak It framework.I also learned a lot by talking to designers,developers, and agile coaches.Thanks, everyone! CHAPTER 4 GENUINE EFFICIENCY 121Figure 4-3 High-level view of product flow from idea to product�%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 measuringand improving.�%Tweak It = continuously improve the product.This is really an endstate; the product stays in Tweak It until it is shut down or reimag-ined (= back to Think It).Spotify has over 30 squads16 and a number of different products, so tokeep track of what s going on and visualize it to the rest of the company,we use a product status board that shows which products are in whichstage.Figure 4-4 shows roughly how the board looks.We are also experimenting with forecasting mechanisms, with squadsproviding a regularly updated date range (date X date Y) for when theythink their product will reach the next stage.Why Four Stages?The biggest risk is building the wrong product a product that doesn t de-light our users or doesn t improve success metrics such as user acquisition,user retention, and so on.We call this product risk. 16.A squad is a small, cross-functional, self-organizing development team.For moreinformation, see Scaling Agile @ Spotify with Tribes, Squads, Chapters, and Guilds, posted at http://blog.crisp.se/2012/11/14/henrikkniberg/scaling-agile-at-spotify. 122 THE LEAN MINDSETFigure 4-4 Portfolio boardFigure 4-5 Risk-versus-cost curvefor four-stage model of product developmentThe four-stage model helps us effectively drive down risk and get prod-ucts out the door quickly.Figure 4-5 shows how product risk (solid line) isreduced at each stage and how cost-intensive each stage is (dashed line).As you can see, the Think It stage drives down risk at a low cost.Youcan also see why we want to shorten the Build It stage as much as pos-sible (high operating cost and little risk reduction).The gradually reduced CHAPTER 4 GENUINE EFFICIENCY 123Figure 4-6 The Think It stageoperating cost in Tweak It reflects that, over time, the product doesn t needto be updated as much and squads can start moving on to other things.The duration of each stage varies a lot; the ratios above are just an ex-ample.The total time varies too; some products get to production withina few months, but others take a half year or more.Within each stage,though, releases (even if only internal) are done on a fairly continuousbasis.So, let s take a closer look at each stage.Think ItProduct ideas are born all the time and can come from anyone in the com-pany
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