Spotify lost roughly a year building a failed swipe-based interface called 'Moments'
Gustav Söderström · Spotify’s Journey To Profitability · Invest Like The Best · May 20, 2025 · at 1:28:39
Spotify CPTO Gustav Söderström recounts his biggest product mistake at Spotify, where an early swipe-based music UI failed and had to be rolled back.
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“And we built this. It was called moments. The UI we used edit editors on the backend, which is did not work at all. So the idea was like far, far ahead of where the technology was and it costed a lot of money. We actually announced it. There's a video of like us presenting this user interface and so forth. People luckily forgot it, but it just didn't work. We had A-B tested it, and it looked ok, which is what we launched. Then we discovered there was a bug in the AB test when it was live and it actually underperformed drastically what we had. So we'd had to roll it back. And I had taken like the entire organization on this excursion that lost us like a year or something in a very competitive business.”
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