April 2016 onwards, Spotify

Thoughtful Execution is a framework that I developed to help teams become more successful in reaching their goals and shipping with impact. It invites you to leverage data and insights in a way that leads to identifying multiple problems or opportunities that could be solved, and advocates for going wide in hypothesis generation and design explorations before zooming into a single solution.

Thoughtful Execution has become a go-to resource for many teams at Spotify, and since its publication on Spotify’s design blog in 2020, other creatives and teams have adopted it as well. 

When you have a goal, your mind starts ideating on how to reach it. It’s fun to start throwing ideas around, and oftentimes, you fall in love with one idea and want to see if it works. However, if you go directly from a goal to a single solution, and that solution doesn’t work, it's really hard to backtrack and determine why. Is it because you designed the solution in the wrong way? Or is the underlying hypothesis not correct? Or are you even solving the right problem?

While gut is an important aid in a creative process, it shouldn’t alone drive strategic decisions or prevent you from exploring multiple solutions to a single hypothesis. To change the mindset of jumping too quickly into one solution, it’s useful to remind yourself or your team of the necessary steps in a thoughtful product development process. And by presenting those steps in a tree structure encourages you to follow the steps in order. 

 I’ve written an in-depth article on Thoughtful Execution in Spotify’s design blog. It’s been one of the most read articles there. 

Thoughtful Execution was first introduced to Spotify's growth organization when we were founding the team with a product lead and an engineering lead. We could soon notice a clear improvement in the quality of hypotheses that the teams were exploring, as well as positive trends in the business metrics we were set out to improve. We didn’t want to introduce Thoughtful Execution as a formal process, but rather as a reminder of the needed steps in a thoughtful product development process. It’s been a great tool for teams to structure and align their work and communicate outwards what they are working on and why, and what the upcoming areas of focus may be.

We gave teams the freedom to decide how they wanted to tackle each step in the tree in terms of methods and tools they want to use, just as long as they were able to document their Thoughtful Execution tree. Some teams documented their Thoughtful Execution tree with post its on the wall, while others rely on on the Figma template or Mural template made by Spotify designer Ryan Smith.

Would your team benefit from Thoughtful Execution?

I've provided training to numerous teams and individuals within Spotify, delivered talks at design conferences, and coached designers and teams in external companies.