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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 Söderström, OskarStål, 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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