The challenge
Spotify was working great for their "Lean In" listeners but the "Lean back" listeners found music curation too time consuming. They needed to increase engagement with these users to continue their growth.
The approach
Rather than asking users to manually curate their music Spotify could create an automatic playlist for each user. However, the CEO, Daniel Ek, wasn't sure if people would like having a playlist automatically added to their accounts. Apple had just received a lot of backlash when they put U2's album into every user's iTunes library.
In a traditional company, when your CEO starts pushing back on your idea the best thing is to let it go. There was a genuine risk with this new feature and if it backfired the team could be fired.
But Spotify is famous for embracing "The Spotify Model" which empowers autonomous teams to make decisions. The team really believed strongly in the potential of this new feature, and since they were autonomous they decided to press ahead.
Reported outcomes
Spotify reports that Discover Weekly began as a Hack Week idea and accumulated more than 2.3 billion listening hours between its 2015 launch and July 2020. This demonstrates adoption of the product; it does not isolate the organizational model as the cause of that adoption.