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Daniel Ek explains the core design principle that helped him build Spotify

April 24, 2025

When he looks at a user interface, Daniel Ek simply asks himself, “Why is it there?”

Daniel continues:

“I think a lot about: What’s the shortest way between point A and point B? And how can you assume as much as possible for the user in that process for making that journey shorter?”

He uses Spotify as an example:

“In a product like Spotify, the [optimal solution would probably be] if we knew everything about you so you can just press play and you just got perfect music. It turns out that problem is incredibly hard to solve from an engineering standpoint… So we might not be able to go there, but how do we ratchet that down? It turns out that it’s probably good if you give us a song so that we can then in turn recommend you more songs... Or if we can get you to search a song and then show you related songs and related artists.”

He continues:

“I think a lot about: what is the perfect and ideal solution to a problem? And then you ratchet it down from there”