Product Overview Live Now
Product Design Lead: Sept 25 – Feb 26

Prompted Podcast Playlists

In early 2025, Spotify kicked off exploration around a new feature called Prompted Playlists. I was pulled in to figure out how this feature could work for podcasts. The goal was to make podcast discovery feel effortless and personal.

This was a high visibility project, which the CTO (now CEO) Gustav Soderstrom was personally invested in, and my product manager and I presented work directly to him.

Prompted Playlists design explorations

Outcomes

This product launched in early 2026, and has been met with positive reviews. Among users who have found the product, podcast discovery is trending upwards, and user return rate is high.

Usage data is also beginning to reveal the ways users are shaping their playlists. Three dominant trends have emerged:

Build me a feed (30%)

Users want a living, auto-updating playlist that acts like a personalized podcast feed:

"Create a playlist that updates daily with the most recent news"

Curate around a topic (30%)

Users want to find content about a specific topic, usually to choose one episode to listen to

"Build me a podcast playlist all about science and innovation"

Manage my backlog (10%)

Users want help organizing what they already have:

"Catch up on shows I'm behind on"