Spotify's short-form video feature to compete with TikTok
Product Strategy Interview Question - Should Spotify build a short-form video feature to compete with TikTok?
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Product Strategy Interview Question -
Should Spotify build a short-form video feature to compete with TikTok?
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Clarifying Questions and Scope:
Who is the decision owner? Is this a product-level strategy decision I own end-to-end or a technical/biz-dev brief?
Scope: consumer mobile apps only, or also web, creator tools, and third-party embeds?
Objective: maximize engagement and retention, grow listener conversion, increase creator monetization, or maximize ad revenue? Pick one primary metric to optimize.
Time horizon: are we optimizing for 12 months, 24 months, or 3 years?
Constraint signals: any hard limits on engineering, moderation, or marketing budgets?
Suggested interviewer assumption if not answered: consumer mobile apps, primary goal = increase MAU retention and long-term listening time over 1 year, and we evaluate build vs not-build.
Framework
Use a combination of:
Job-to-be-done and user intent segmentation.
4C (Customer, Company, Competitors, Context) plus a concise SWOT.
Economics and unit-economics analysis.
Build / buy / partner / skip decision options.
Experimentation and measurable success criteria.
Explain which framework you are using before you dig in.
Analysis
Customer / User intent
Primary Spotify user jobs: discover and listen to music and podcasts, background listening, curated playlists, and episodic consumption.
TikTok job: high-attention short visual entertainment, quick dopamine loops, creator discovery and content virality.
User intent mismatch: audio-first consumption is often passive and multi-tasking, short-form video is active, visual, and high-attention scrolling. These are different product needs and behavioural patterns.
Company fit
Core advantages to leverage: audio recommender infrastructure, catalog licensing relationships, podcast ecosystem, existing creator payment flows, music metadata/rights.
Weaknesses relative to short-form video: limited visual-native creator tools, weaker social graph, less experience in moderation at TikTok scale, and lower ad ARPU historically.
Competition and market dynamics
Short-form video is winner-take-most with large creator subsidies and enormous moderation and infrastructure costs. Major incumbents already fight fiercely. Late entrants face high marginal costs to acquire creators and attention.
Competing for creator attention directly against TikTok, Shorts and Reels is a low-probability path to market leadership.
Economics and monetization
Revenue upside: ads, higher session time, potential new premium features for creators.
Costs and risks: infrastructure and CDN costs, moderation and content safety costs, creator payouts and incentives, marketing to shift user habits. Probable negative ROI if trying to replicate the feed model.
Technical and operational considerations
Required capabilities: vertical video player, low-latency feed ranking, creator tooling, upload and transcoding pipeline, content moderation (automated + human), copyright detection for visual + audio, and UI changes across platforms.
Integration complexity: linking clips back to full track rights, ensuring label/licensing compliance for short clips, and handling music video rights.
Network and creator effects
Short-form feeds thrive on creator incentives, viral discovery loops, and densely connected social graphs. Spotify’s creator network is audio-first; migrating creators to produce visual-native content requires heavy incentives.
User safety, content moderation, and legal
Visual content increases moderation complexity: nudity, violence, minors, and platform liability. This increases operating costs and regulatory exposure across markets.
Strategic alternatives
Build a full TikTok clone. High cost, high risk, low probability to win.
Do nothing. Low cost, may miss strategic shifts in discovery.
Targeted, audio-first clips and creator-first tools that amplify audio discovery without becoming a general video feed. Lower cost, aligned with mission, higher probability of adding measurable value.
