YouSaid · the spoken record

Maya Prohovnik

lines on the record: 80
first: 2023-09-28
most recent: 2023-09-28
sittings or episodes: 1
sources: podcast

Every line below is reproduced as it was said and linked to the record it came from. Nothing here is summarised or generated. Directory · Search · Corrections

“At the time, 2015, there were still so few people podcasting. It was still so hard to do. And so we originally were really stuck on this idea that like podcasting was going to be limiting and that we wanted to be the next thing in the early days of anchor, we had all this like nautical terminology. So we would call them waves and I don't remember what else, but we had like cute nautical terms for everything because we were trying to resist podcasts and podcaster and those things. And when we launched Anchor 2.0, we started getting all of this really great traction. And the number one feature request that we got from people is they were like, great, I love using these tools. And then I want to export it as a podcast and publish it, you know, and get people listening that way. And we resisted it for probably, I don't know, six months or something. And we were like, absolutely not, that's not what we're doing. And I think that one was such an interesting lesson because we had just sort of learned that we did the right thing by not listening to our users. So for a while, we dug in and we were like, that's not the direction we're going in. They don't know what they actually want.”
2023-09-28 · Lenny's Podcast · Building Anchor, selling to Spotify, and lessons learned | Maya Prohovnik (Spotify’s Head of Podcast Product) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I can just quickly. My second example was so we actually had to do it again. So we went from Anchor 1.0 to 2.0. We were like, that was totally the right call. And then Anchor 2.0. We were still in this phase where we would always joke about it because people would be like, oh, it's kind of like making a podcast. And we would be like, it's not a podcast because we're trying to be bigger than podcasts, right? Because we were like,”
2023-09-28 · Lenny's Podcast · Building Anchor, selling to Spotify, and lessons learned | Maya Prohovnik (Spotify’s Head of Podcast Product) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I do think that's so important, and I give a lot of credit to Mike and Near, our co founders. I think they really knew what they wanted to do when they started the company, and they were very firm on that and never varied that throughout the years, throughout the acquisition. And so I do think not everyone's goal is to build like a massive multi-billion dollar world-changing business. Like that's okay if that's not your goal. But if that is your goal, you know, you have to stick to it and you have to, it's really hard, but you have to keep pivoting to get to where you want to be.”
2023-09-28 · Lenny's Podcast · Building Anchor, selling to Spotify, and lessons learned | Maya Prohovnik (Spotify’s Head of Podcast Product) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“You're trying to democratize something, and your target user is everyone on the planet. I think you really have to be willing to kill your darlings and let things go when they're not getting where you need them to be.”
2023-09-28 · Lenny's Podcast · Building Anchor, selling to Spotify, and lessons learned | Maya Prohovnik (Spotify’s Head of Podcast Product) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Feel guilty when we were talking to our users about what they wanted us to be working on. But I think it was one of those things where as soon as we launched 2.0, it's like our numbers started shooting up and we started seeing like more kinds of people were using it and people were suddenly using it in the way that we had always imagined, like sort of as a replacement for the old school, you know, like very difficult to make traditional podcasts. I don't know. I guess the lesson is you have to be able to sort of tell the signal through the noise. And even if you've got lots of vocal users asking for something, we used to have this rule, the 80-20 rule where it's like you can't just build for that 20, I don't think we made this up, by the way. I think this is a common thing, but we'd always refer to it and say, like, we want to be building for the 80%. And even though the 20% are going to be more vocal, that's just going to like get you deeper into that hole of like that problem of you're not really building for everyone. And I think particularly when you're trying to build a creative platform.”
2023-09-28 · Lenny's Podcast · Building Anchor, selling to Spotify, and lessons learned | Maya Prohovnik (Spotify’s Head of Podcast Product) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“It absolutely worked out. I mean, I think it was a terrifying transition. You know, it's like it takes, it took us at the time. It took us like a few months to build a whole new app. It takes longer now. But the whole time we were building it, we were like, we weren't sure if it was a mistake, you know, and we would like go back and forth and we would.”
2023-09-28 · Lenny's Podcast · Building Anchor, selling to Spotify, and lessons learned | Maya Prohovnik (Spotify’s Head of Podcast Product) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Telling your personal story and sort of close relationships and more about kind of projecting and using different tools. Anyway, so we made that call, I think, pretty much just on gut. And it was like, this is a business decision, like this is where we think the next phase needs to be. When we built Anchor 2.0, it was a lot more like the tools that we wanted to use, even though it wasn't with the user base was asking for. So I think that's one example of like sometimes your users are not going to, it's that whole like users don't always know what to ask for. They don't always know like what problems they need you to solve for them. And so I think you really have to be able to like hear what's behind it or really like even if the data is looking okay, think about if it's heading to where you need it to go.”
2023-09-28 · Lenny's Podcast · Building Anchor, selling to Spotify, and lessons learned | Maya Prohovnik (Spotify’s Head of Podcast Product) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Just wasn't ever going to be big enough. And so we had this really interesting moment where the users were all telling us there's no problem. Like we love this product. They were using it every day. They were coming back. It was slowly growing. And we were just like, this just isn't going to get us to where we need to be. Like our original goal had been we wanted to democratize audio. We wanted to make it something where anyone could easily tell their story. And we were like, if we keep sort of digging ourselves into this niche that a small number of people really, really love, that's great, but that's not really like the mission that we sent out set out to solve. And so the 1.0 to 2.0 transition was, I think, actually pretty.”
2023-09-28 · Lenny's Podcast · Building Anchor, selling to Spotify, and lessons learned | Maya Prohovnik (Spotify’s Head of Podcast Product) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Terminology is also very important when you're trying to convince people of things. So, I think when I was thinking about those big transitions for us as a team, I think both times we had these sort of like big moments with our teams where we had to get everyone on board with making these big changes. So with Anchor 1.0, I don't know if you remember, but it was like actually similar to what Clubhouse, I think, just rebranded to, like more sort of like voice messaging and short form and like more about connections between people. And that was the first thing we ever launched. And people loved it. Like people were very excited about it. The data was all good. Like we had extremely retained users. We anecdotally we were hearing all this stuff from users all the time that they were like staying up all night to use the app. People were meeting each other and falling in love and getting married on our platform. Like all of these really kind of magical things. And we were seeing like the user base was growing consistently. But I think we had this feeling. And when I say we, I mean mostly like Mike and I at the time, Mike was our CEO that it.”
2023-09-28 · Lenny's Podcast · Building Anchor, selling to Spotify, and lessons learned | Maya Prohovnik (Spotify’s Head of Podcast Product) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And I think it's a totally valid one. And it's just, I think you need to be clear that that's what you're working with, but then it should be taken as seriously as any other data point. So I try and think of it that way where it's like, this should all ideally kind of work together. And obviously the more data you have and the more types of data you have, the more convincing you're going to be and the more right you're going to be. So I think it all helps. There were so many of these in the early days of Anchor because I don't even know, I don't think we had a data scientist until we were part of Spotify. So I think it was just sort of engineers like, you know, running queries. But we, there were a couple times where we had to kind of like move anchor from like 1.0 to 2.0 and then from 2.0 to 3.0. We did these like big, I don't like to call them pivots, but sort of like evolutions, let's say, of our product or our strategy.”
2023-09-28 · Lenny's Podcast · Building Anchor, selling to Spotify, and lessons learned | Maya Prohovnik (Spotify’s Head of Podcast Product) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Had to learn is that being gut driven isn't the same as just saying to people, I told you so, or like I believe this, so you have to do it. There really is an art, I think, to balancing that. And I think that what I try to do is always still as objectively as possible explain why my gut is feeling that way. So it's like you can refer back to your years of experience or other things that you've done that have been similar. You can talk about your experience as a user testing this stuff. You can bring in stories and anecdotes from users to help back it up. And so I have found that that works obviously a lot better. And I think that in the times that either I have done this or I've seen other leaders do it where they're just sort of like, well, we're just going to do it this way, even if you guys don't agree or if the data says something different, those projects are always immediately doomed from the beginning. They're never going to work. You can't sort of drag all these people through something that they don't believe in. So I think that like I would think of your gut actually as a type of data.”
2023-09-28 · Lenny's Podcast · Building Anchor, selling to Spotify, and lessons learned | Maya Prohovnik (Spotify’s Head of Podcast Product) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Success metrics and that we know what we're looking for when we launch, then we're going to follow, et cetera. So it's like I think there's different times and places for all the different types of data collection that you can do. The other thing I would say is something that I have had to learn as a leader, especially as part of a larger organization, you know, when we were a startup, Anchor was like 20 people when we got acquired by Spotify. And by the way, Spotify is my first big tech company. So I've always been a startup. So I've learned a lot about that. But when I was leading product at a startup, it's like, we're a small team. We're really focused on moving quickly. There isn't a whole lot of stopping to ask what data is supporting this or it's just sort of like we talk to some users and we're like, great, that's a problem. We're just going to go and fix it. And I think at Spotify, there's obviously at places like Spotify. I mean, large organizations, there's obviously a lot more people that you need to coordinate. There's a lot of people you have to influence that aren't on your immediate team. And so I think something that I've”
2023-09-28 · Lenny's Podcast · Building Anchor, selling to Spotify, and lessons learned | Maya Prohovnik (Spotify’s Head of Podcast Product) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So much knowledge about our users and different cohorts and what people need and what they're missing. And so I think that's extremely valuable. I think where people get into trouble is when they think that they can rely solely on the data. And so what I spent a lot of time talking to my team about is how we can balance that. So thinking about, I guess, a couple general things I would say are there are right and wrong times, I think, for both for your gut and for data. And then there are lots of different kinds of data and different ways to use that data. So I think when you're in the trap of just sort of being like, well, this is like the process we always have with insights and we're just going to run this every time we have a feature. Like I don't think you're going to have a great time. I think if you think of it as part of the creative process as a PM where you're like, you know, I have a hypothesis. I have some data that is helping me understand that hypothesis in the first place or form it in the first place. Then I'm going to do some user research and like try a couple things and see what works for people. Then I'm going to make sure that we have”
2023-09-28 · Lenny's Podcast · Building Anchor, selling to Spotify, and lessons learned | Maya Prohovnik (Spotify’s Head of Podcast Product) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“If you remember the old days of the internet, I feel like there was really this different way of thinking about product development where it was so much more about what felt good and what made you sort of feel something as a user in that product. And so it's like, we used to be a lot more playful, I think, with software. I think we used to put a lot more emphasis on things like delightful animations or like fun little Easter eggs. And I'm not sure when or where that got lost, but it feels like as product management as a role has gotten sort of formalized and become a little bit more scientific. I'm generalizing, but I think a lot of product managers can be so focused on like using the right frameworks and making sure that they have the right roadmap and all of this stuff. And then it's like you find yourself in this cycle where you're just building things to build them and not really thinking about the connection to the end user. You know, I think data is amazing. And I'm like, we have such an incredible insights team at Spotify, both my insights team and then the broader one. I think we are so, so lucky and we have so.”
2023-09-28 · Lenny's Podcast · Building Anchor, selling to Spotify, and lessons learned | Maya Prohovnik (Spotify’s Head of Podcast Product) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Totally. Yeah. And I also, I mean, one of my, this is less about dog fooding, but one of my favorite things is I'm always just trying to convince everyone I meet to start a podcast. That's just become my annoying thing. And so it's like if I'm interviewing someone for a job or if I'm at a party and mingling with people, it's like somehow the conversation always turns to their passions. And then I'm like, you should make a podcast about it. And then they're like, well, I can't. And then I work my way through all the reasons they say they can't do it. And then they go start a podcast. So I'm like one person at a time.”
2023-09-28 · Lenny's Podcast · Building Anchor, selling to Spotify, and lessons learned | Maya Prohovnik (Spotify’s Head of Podcast Product) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I think because I understand a big part of building tools for podcasters is understanding all the barriers to entry. Like it's actually a really difficult thing trying to get someone to put their voice out there, share their story. It's a really kind of emotional journey. And so I feel like I've tried to turn some of the things that I've learned about podcasting into, I've never written it down. Maybe I should, but I have sort of a like a playbook that I'll tell people when they're considering making their own podcast. So it's just things like don't try and record by yourself. Find a friend. You know, like that's a much easier way to get into it or, you know, don't follow a script because then you're going to feel really awkward and uncomfortable and not feel good about it afterwards or don't just record a test thing for 30 seconds and publish it because then you're not actually, you have to kind of make yourself feel the pain that we're trying to understand in our users.”
2023-09-28 · Lenny's Podcast · Building Anchor, selling to Spotify, and lessons learned | Maya Prohovnik (Spotify’s Head of Podcast Product) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Whenever we do an off-site or like any sort of team activity, we'll always incorporate podcast creation or like some way of making sure everyone on the team is using the tools. I think also, I don't know, I think a lot of it just comes from I'm so vocal about this stuff. Like the other night I was recording a podcast and I DM'd one of the engineers on our team and told him about this like tiny little iOS bug and he was like, why are you DMing me about this at like nine o'clock at night? I think I was also supposed to be on vacation. I can't remember. But then it's like he got the bug fixed the next day. And so I do think like making that something that's really top of mind for the team that we do need to fix problems, that these things matter. I don't know. I always listen to the podcast that my team makes. So it's sort of like I know they're going to get at least one listener. And then I think also I try to.”
2023-09-28 · Lenny's Podcast · Building Anchor, selling to Spotify, and lessons learned | Maya Prohovnik (Spotify’s Head of Podcast Product) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I'm constantly reminding our team to do this, and then I think that also comes from the other people who are doing it. We really elevate the people on our team who have their own podcast. We help them tell their stories internally.”
2023-09-28 · Lenny's Podcast · Building Anchor, selling to Spotify, and lessons learned | Maya Prohovnik (Spotify’s Head of Podcast Product) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Me, I don't know if I mentioned this to you, but when I first got into tech, I started in customer support. That was how I got into product. And so I think I just am a very user focused product person. I think there's different schools of thought for product. And for me, it's always been about making people happy, making their experience better, solving real problems in their lives. And so for me, like becoming one of the users, I think it's made it so much easier for me to advocate for that being, you know, a pretty big chunk of the roadmap because I think if you don't have that, especially coming from someone in leadership, it's so easy to just fall into that trap of like, well, we're working on the next big strategic thing, which is two years away. And then in the meantime, your users are getting no value and then they're just going somewhere else. So I don't know. I think it's just really important to me. It makes sense to me. And I also, I'm not sure how else I would do product. I've never really not done it that way.”
2023-09-28 · Lenny's Podcast · Building Anchor, selling to Spotify, and lessons learned | Maya Prohovnik (Spotify’s Head of Podcast Product) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“It's just always been my natural state. I've had a handful of different product jobs and I guess they've all been sort of tangentially related to helping creators or creative people. And so I think for me, it's like I don't know how you can build those tools if you don't understand that mindset. I'm not surprised that it came to Wilma's mind when you asked her what to ask me because I am constantly yelling at my product team who do not have podcasts and being like, I really don't think that you can build the right things if you're, you know, they talk to users all the time. They see the data, but all of them, once they finally start doing their podcast, they're like, I get it. Like something clicked and now I feel like I really understand what they need. And I think, I guess like building tools for creators is similar to building a B2B product where you really have to understand it's someone's business, it's their livelihood. And so I think if you're just looking at a list of feature requests, you're not necessarily going to prioritize it in the same way as if you deeply feel those problems. And I think for”
2023-09-28 · Lenny's Podcast · Building Anchor, selling to Spotify, and lessons learned | Maya Prohovnik (Spotify’s Head of Podcast Product) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I have not, and I think it's just, it's so funny because with my parenting podcast too, and even my terrible big brother podcast, I get compliments all the time and people are like, I love listening to this. You and my husband also is like a really funny and a really good podcaster. But I don't know why I don't think of myself as a creator. I think to me it still feels like this exercise where it's like I'm making my podcast, but I'm really doing it so that I can like learn about our product and get in the mindset of a creator. So I think the problem is I'm just too much of a product person. It's a means to an end for me instead of the end itself. But that is an interesting question because I know most people who podcast their ultimate goal is obviously to be able to do it full time. And that is interesting that I have not.”
2023-09-28 · Lenny's Podcast · Building Anchor, selling to Spotify, and lessons learned | Maya Prohovnik (Spotify’s Head of Podcast Product) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Have been documenting our journey as parents all the way from we went through IVF, so starting with sort of like fertility. I have a really fun episode about childbirth if people are interested in that sort of thing. And then ever since then, it's just been episodes about the transition to parenthood, which has not been particularly easy for us. And now my son's a toddler. So lots of fun things happening there. You're not there yet, but you will be. And then you can listen to my toddler episodes.”
2023-09-28 · Lenny's Podcast · Building Anchor, selling to Spotify, and lessons learned | Maya Prohovnik (Spotify’s Head of Podcast Product) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Like, if you don't know if anyone's listening, if you don't know what they like about it, if you don't know if they're coming back, it's so hard to keep investing the time. And then I made a show, my least known podcast because it only got like 25 listeners per episode. It's about my favorite book of all time called Children of Time. It's actually a trilogy. And the reason it got almost no listeners is because there were tons of spoilers in the podcast and the book is like 800 pages long. So we were like, do not listen if you haven't read the book. So it was very niche, but I think it's a really good podcast if you've read Children of Time. And then my last one I just started doing a couple years ago is about parenting. So I have a son who's two and a half now and we sort of”
2023-09-28 · Lenny's Podcast · Building Anchor, selling to Spotify, and lessons learned | Maya Prohovnik (Spotify’s Head of Podcast Product) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“It's terrible. Like, I would not recommend listening to my podcast unless you are a Big Brother super fan. And I actually started that one because I wanted to get the other end of the spectrum where something we were really focused on with Anchor at the time was, you know, first time creators really growing the pie of podcasters. And specifically, we had this theory that podcast creation of the future would be mobile first. And we had this really high-powered mobile app. And so I was like, I'm going to make a podcast that's fully mobile, not highly edited. not worry about making something that sounds like a traditional podcast. And I really leaned into all the anchor features. So it's fully recorded on my phone. I do almost no editing. But I think the thing that's kept us going because it's been like six or seven years now we've been doing the show, it's really the community, like the people who call in. I have no idea who these people are. I have no idea how they found this terrible show, but they love it. They call in every week. And that, I think, is one of the many things I've learned from dog fooding, you know, a podcast creation app is like that community.”
2023-09-28 · Lenny's Podcast · Building Anchor, selling to Spotify, and lessons learned | Maya Prohovnik (Spotify’s Head of Podcast Product) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, like for a test podcast that I was just doing to learn how to do my job, I was like, I was so excited to get that audience. And I fell off because, well, mostly like I had a kid. I joined Spotify. My life's really busy. And like that level of production is so hard to do if it's not your full-time job. But I still get emails all the time from people who are like, please bring it back. I never found another great Stephen King because I really got deep into the books and like the connection between the books. So that was one of them. The second one I did, I still going today. So my husband and I have this big brother podcast, the show Big Brother.”
2023-09-28 · Lenny's Podcast · Building Anchor, selling to Spotify, and lessons learned | Maya Prohovnik (Spotify’s Head of Podcast Product) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Production or what it feels to even be a creator in that way. And so I started my Stephen King podcast because that is the number one thing that I just love to talk about every day, which is one of my tips for podcasters. If you're trying to figure out what to make a show about, it's what can you talk about forever. So I did that one for a while. I actually like I spent a ton of time editing it. I spent a ton of time on SEO and marketing it. And it got to the point, I think at its peak, I was getting like 5,000 listeners an episode, which now seems small for a podcast, I know.”
2023-09-28 · Lenny's Podcast · Building Anchor, selling to Spotify, and lessons learned | Maya Prohovnik (Spotify’s Head of Podcast Product) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Sure, well, I can talk about them forever, so be careful because I'll take off the whole hour with that. But I actually have four podcasts. There's two that I don't update as much anymore. So my first ever podcast was about Stephen King books. I'm a big Stephen King super fan. So, when I joined Anchor and we weren't even fully podcast yet, if you recall, we were sort of like something else audio. We were trying to avoid being podcast for a while. And then we decided to just be podcast. But when I got into audio and trying to help audio creators, the first thing I did was make my own podcast because I was like, I know nothing about.”
2023-09-28 · Lenny's Podcast · Building Anchor, selling to Spotify, and lessons learned | Maya Prohovnik (Spotify’s Head of Podcast Product) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, so I think at this point, it's more than 75% of all new shows on Spotify are hosted with Spotify for podcasters, which used to be Anchor. When we were acquired by Spotify, I think Anchor had already gotten to like 40% of all new podcasts or something crazy. So yeah.”
2023-09-28 · Lenny's Podcast · Building Anchor, selling to Spotify, and lessons learned | Maya Prohovnik (Spotify’s Head of Podcast Product) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I totally agree. I was thinking the same thing when I was preparing for it, where it's like so much of what we have to talk about is so meta. And then we also have you and I know each other because you've been sending me feedback about the podcast experience on Spotify. So lots of circular stuff there.”
2023-09-28 · Lenny's Podcast · Building Anchor, selling to Spotify, and lessons learned | Maya Prohovnik (Spotify’s Head of Podcast Product) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“We were obsessed with reducing friction. This was like our constant battle. And so we hired a couple of college interns and we brought them in. And we were like, people are going to push this magical one button in the anchor app. And they're going to say, I want to distribute my podcast. And your job is going to be to do all that same manual stuff manually. But to them, it's going to feel magical and like it happened automatically. I still don't know how many people know this. I think people think that we had some secret door like backdoor deal with Apple for distribution. But we just had college students making Apple podcast accounts and then submitting like hundreds of thousands of podcasts through these accounts. And I think that was a really big part of why we got so much hosting market share so quickly because it was such an insane benefit over the other platforms which otherwise had been sort of commoditized at that point.”
2023-09-28 · Lenny's Podcast · Building Anchor, selling to Spotify, and lessons learned | Maya Prohovnik (Spotify’s Head of Podcast Product) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source