Groove Blog

Thanks for making it clear that you work at Spotify. Transparency is good start :-)

I just watched both videos. Thanks so much for doing these ! Or maybe thank Henrik when you see him, haha :-)

I have a lot of questions.

From what I understand, Spotify squads each focus on one area and each squad has very different members so it can stay autonomous. Is that right? What happens if sysadmin / developer / designer from squad X gets hit by a bus ? I'm actually talking about the bus factor [1] here, I hope you are all well :-)

How often do you change squads ? What about tribes ? The second video mentions "guild unconferences". What is that ? Can squads work remotely ?

How does code review work at Spotify ? For the last 2 weeks, we've been using pull requests on Github, which I've found to be a very good way of doing code review. Since the reviewer is the one to merge, eventually his/her name is on the commit too, which in my case makes me focus even more before hitting the "Merge" button. Merging creates an explicit merge commit, which makes reverting things easy if needed. And discussion in the comments allow for efficient, asynchronous discussion.

The video talks about how important trusting employees is to Spotify. That makes me wonder: do employees sign such things as non disclosure or non compete agreements ? what do you (or what does Spotify) think of such agreement ?

For the last few months, I've been reading the Groove blog [2]. Recently, Alex, Groove's CEO, talked…

Thanks for the article Kevin, but I am afraid that most of your audience will find that just tweaking colors or copy will not produce any meaningful results for their businesses. Let me explain…

We’ve found that a successful approach to A/B testing is really dependent on the type of company you’re operating and product that you’re offering. Small cosmetic changes to the UI or copy often result in equally small changes to click-thru or conversion rates, and so these A/B tests require relatively greater levels of statistical power in order to achieve significance.

For mega-traffic companies like Google or Amazon, these kinds of tests are worth the cost of testing because a sub-1% lift still contributes substantially to their bottom line.

But for everyone else, ‘shallow’ A/B tests of a button color or call to action will often yield inconclusive results. Here’s an article from the founder of GrooveHQ detailing such an experience: http://www.groovehq.com/blog/failed-ab-tests.

If you’re running a small or medium business – or even a larger one that does not have the scalable testing practices of a tech giant like Amazon in place – testing deeper changes to the product, UI layouts or entire UX workflows are what move the needle.
This is what we’re now calling ‘empathic A/B testing’ – where tests are designed with empathy for users.

If you ask the questions: What changes can I make to my product or website that would motivate my users to take the actions I want them to take?…

HN is more of a 'show and tell' rather than a platform for repeat-marketing. Every time someone reveals numbers behind their front paging it's awful as a growth mechanism, if the blog posts aren't even selling your company/product then it's even worse because that's another cliff in the conversion funnel from visitor to anything-of-value. Another startup recently revealed they got just 44 trial registrations from three distinct front page stories [1] and over 9000 visitors.

Another example that comes to mind is yesterday's marketing blog post by GrooveHQ [2]. It was their second front page post in nine months and 50+ attempts, and it wasn't even about their company or product. Instead it was about a different company whose content marketing for their ideal visitors had ironically grown their blog to 250,000 visitors a month. I wouldn't be too quick to consider optimizing for HN harmless.

To me it all reeks of @sama's "fake work" post from yesterday [3], right down to the justifications founders come up with - you're not going to achieve "TOMA" for enterprise social network software from a briefly popular blog post about something silly and unrelated Oracle said. You already achieved everything you will from it - a brief bump in your page views.

[1] http://blog.yesgraph.com/yesgraph-tc-ph-hn-omg-bbq/

[2] https://www.groovehq.com/blog/zapier-interview-with-wade-foster

[3] http://blog.samaltman.com/the-post-yc-slump

What's important is to not get caught up by all these success stories. They are just massive leaps from where your current situation is and it'll demotivate you because you feel like you can't get there.

There are many stories where people start from literally nothing at all. And you never ever here all the work that goes into creating success (not to mention luck as well). Here's my favourite blog post about just grinding it out: https://www.groovehq.com/blog/lewis-howes-interview

Instead, start off by having a big goal but also one more modest - nothing too easy but not one that's too improbably to achieve. It's important to have small wins just as it is to have big wins. Everyday is an opportunity to improve things. Analyze what just happened and continuously improve and grow.

Personally, I knew of a person who lived in his van, who went on to become a famous photographer and earned millions. During his moment of success, he became arrogant and stop challenging himself. Eventually, his wealth faded away and he was back in his van. It was only after he started appreciating everything in his life and started to challenge did he see his fortune come back again.

I believe that you're destined for greatness. Your situation is temporary and you can absolutely change it. Don't be depressed by someone else's success. Keep going.

My thoughts, in random order:

-As long as humans still respond to storytelling -- something we've been doing for as long as we've been around -- branding will have a role.

-Nothing is more central to a brand than having a good product that people want. No amount of storytelling can replace this.

-$30K to spend on a consultant at this point in the startups life seems silly. It might have been better to just get all your employees together and engaged in brainstorming with some kind of framework to guide you, like this one [1].

-A/B testing and branding should work together. The most important thing you can test is your offer, the basic way you convey yourself to your clients and prospects. Focus on optimizing the copy first, not the color of the buttons.[2]
A great way to do this is by listening to how your existing customers describe their problem, your product and how the two relate. Use their words.

[1] http://www.cezary.co/post/79977288955/marketing-fundamentals-canvas

[2] http://www.groovehq.com/blog/long-form-landing-page

Thank you for sharing this valuable lesson!

Few questions to understand the context. At what stage were the startup you worked with mostly?

Did you ever encountered a "proper" hand-off of the MVP? If so, what was it like or what would you suggest?

I guess the idea for me is to have the MVP developed based on getting angel investment and start looking for PMF together with already looking for seed and tech co-founder & inhouse tech team and then after you find the PMF rebuilding it completely anyway.

But you are right that finding PMF is continuous process and might take years and many iterations and the big question is what kind of answers you can get from 1 MVP/prototype built in 3 weeks or so (it should not take longer than that as I agree with what you say - make it as small as possible)

p.s. thanks for the articles, great reading. I agree that before MVP there should be prototypes that validates the hypothesis.

I was inspired by this article btw. https://www.groovehq.com/blog/technical-co-founder