In my last blog post, “A Product Manager Case Study on Walled Gardens” I created two user personas representing a customer at Tidal (the lossless hi-fi streaming service) and at Spotify (the most popular streaming platform in the world). Here is a reminder of those two personas. 

All caught up? Great! I decided to put together a post assuming that I was the product manager or product owner at Spotify, and I had recently read this blog post seeing what the competition (Tidal) is doing. I want to implement this functionality for my app as well. This is done through documenting a user story for the dev team, and this is an example of the user story I might put together having read that article on my competitor (Tidal)’s features.  

If I am successful, the dev team reading this post will have a “definition of Done” an outline of sub-tasks or tasks, a user persona(s) that the story applies to, and an idea of how much time this process will take.

Example User Story

• As Nathan – I want to share songs with my friends who use a different streaming service than me.  Particularly my friend/family member who is a “Steven” and insists on using a different streaming service than me. I want to be able to share a song through text messaging, or social media with Steven and have them be able to listen to the song on their own streaming service. As Nathan I care about convenience, and I don’t want to be lectured by a Steven about some streaming service I’ve never heard of, or Spotify’s audio quality. I just want the Stevens in my life to enjoy the music I’m sharing. As a “Nathan” I want the conversation to be about the artist and the music, not about the audio quality, app signup process, or any other information. Just the music! As a “Nathan” this process will encourage me to share more music with the “Stevens” in my life, which will increase my time spent in the app.
• As a product manager/product owner at Spotify, I want metrics on who our users are sharing music with outside of our streaming service. I want to know what percentage of users Nathan is sharing with Steven, or other services such as Apple Music users, Youtube Music users, Amazon Music users and “no service” users who will just listen to the song on the free (low quality + ads) tier of Spotify.

How We Know We’re Done

After reading this user story, we now have our goals, and we’ll know we’re “done” when the following is done:

1. Users can share songs on Spotify with users who don’t use Spotify.
2. We can collect analytics on the non-Spotify streaming services our Spotify users are sharing songs with.

Example Task List

• Evaluate micro-services that can add this feature (such as feature.fm)
  • This needs to be evaluated for monetary cost, and time cost.
  • The micro service needs to be evaluated for compatibility with our analytics capabilities (What format is the data available in, does the API give us everything we need, is there a cost or limit to our queries, etc.)
• Design user interface for the updated share button.
• Implement logic to invoke the external API when the share button is tapped.
• Integrate the selected external API into the app’s codebase.
• Develop error handling for cases where the API request fails.
• Test the share functionality on various devices and screen sizes.
• Implement any necessary user authentication or authorization mechanisms required by the API.
• Update app documentation to include information about the new share functionality.
• Optimize the share button for performance and reliability.
• Conduct user acceptance testing to ensure the share functionality meets user expectations (Potentially an A/B test).
• Obtain necessary legal permissions and comply with any data protection regulations related to sharing content with the API.