Did an unpaid intern actually create Spotify wrapped?
Recently, I’ve come across several posts online claiming that Spotify Wrapped, the popular year-end music recap feature, was actually invented by an unpaid intern. As someone who loves digging into the truth, I was curious to reach out to see if anybody had any insight on this. #Spotify #Internship #Design #Product @spotify
These dumb articles come up every year when wrapped is released. Anyone who has any idea how product ideation and launches work should understand that this is not true. Wrapped was already long in the works when the intern gave this preso. Sure, her project had **some** overlap, but she deffo didn’t “create” wrapped.
Thank you for your perspective. Out of curiosity did you know this person or have insight into the situation at all?
Yes. But she was a woman of color and Spotify did not know how to support her internally. She was viewed as a temporary asset that wouldn’t have a voice after she was gone. They got what they wanted from her for pennies on the dollar of a FTE and she wasn’t needed anymore. They didn’t hire her back full time. Teams or the company itself will always get the “credit” externally. Spotify inherently has struggled to hire managers with external experience to be able to support the growth of people of color more than 1 level higher in their discipline, or foster the growth of an intern such as that one. Source: Myself. Years at spotify working close to that team every year since it was created.
wouldn’t surprise me
Spotify’s UI/UX has always been design driven. Spotify is a music and design company. The strong use of ML for the recommender algo is what makes it a tech company. You’ll notice the app doesn’t really change too much or venture too far in terms of UI/UX. PMs for those teams rely on Design and User Research to drive what should change within the UI/UX. The belief is that if users are unhappy with the experience, we will lose subscriptions, which makes it hard to innovate. Being design-driven works OK for those particular product areas, but not for other product areas like ads or platform, for example. A fancy designed slide deck has become a staple for every product, data, or engineering related discussion or proposal because it is what the D-Team are used to. Similar to the app, the design is what captures and keeps leadership’s attention and continued budget allocation for a team. Outside of ML which is strong, there has always been less focus on strong engineering skills in some areas. The focus has been great user experiences and increasing rate of subscriptions. Most PMs at Spotify serve to gather insights and work with design to create a compelling story for leadership to bet on and get excited about putting resources towards. They are not there to learn or grow much. The Spotify name brings great people to the company, but those coming from “big tech” stagnate and are not growing in their careers as they are no longer able to innovate and they usually leave soon after joining. Design and user researchers dictate much of the work. In this case, they pacified the design intern until her internship was over, leveraged her design ideas, and a PM and a few Engineers used it for promotions and resume boosters after it launched.
The person responsible for the concept should receive credit where credit is due for a design that was brought to release and was largely popular and responsible for elevating the Spotify brand. That is not what happened here.
This is true. It is unfortunate Spotify does not operate this way.
Her feelings are valid, I get why she is upset. I simultaneously feel empathy for the other employees and interns who worked alongside her— what was their experience? The question that people are afraid to ask is : Why wasn’t she hired? An answer to that might be that she lacks empathy for others, and views herself as a victim. Another answer might be that her manager didn’t give her direct feedback, and therefore she didn’t have the opportunity to grow. A combination of the two may have been that she responded very negatively to feedback and therefore did not give her manager a safe space to relay that feedback, instantly going from an asset to a liability, which is also valid. The last one is the possibility that her manager did not like her, and did not want her to succeed, regardless of her performance and desire to learn. The only situation where I would not empathize with her at all, is if she left and never followed up asking if there were opportunities and went straight to social media to complain (which I highly doubt happened) I guess we’ll never know.
Except a Spotify employee who worked with the team confirmed she built it but was not compensated. Take your racism and prejudice outta here. She was an intern. She was definitely not paid well. It's hilarious you think that it was white/Asian people that created it. She doesn't think she deserves the credit. She actually deserves the credit. Hilarious that you all get your feelings hurt when it turns our that your racist pre-conceived notions don't translate into reality.
I saw the post last year from the person who said she created the idea. Unpaid intern pitched it to her manager was told “thanks great idea” and then next thing she knew it was released without any credit to her.
The idea of credit is very interesting to me. When you are hired as an employee, whether it be permanent or temporary, you are doing a service to a company, and getting paid to do said service, no? Her hurt feelings are certainly valid, we have all been there. My assumption, which could be totally off, is that she was not asked to come back for another reason, and she was unfortunately not given the feedback or the opportunity to course correct. I could be wrong though.
Maybe idk but the part that isn’t taken into account is that Wrapped was such a great idea. Culturally it really elevated Spotify and generated even more revenue so to not have the unpaid intern even receive that line on her resume seems predatory. The PMs who conceptualise products at least are aware of their progress and can take credit for them, which adds to their value as an employee both in and out of the company