Designing a native social layer for Spotify to deepen engagement, justify Premium value, and build community — without ever leaving the app.
Live walkthrough of the Community Tab prototype — sharing, events, and personalization, all inside Spotify.
This project was completed as part of the NYU Product Management Club's product team, and was ultimately presented to a panel of PMs and directors. Over five months, I led research, ideation, prioritization, and spec-writing for a new social feature within Spotify's mobile app.
Spotify's mission is to unlock human creativity and give artists the opportunity to live off their art. Yet, despite being the world's largest music streaming platform, Spotify offers almost no native way for listeners to interact — with each other, or with the artists they love.
Spotify's primary revenue driver is Premium subscriptions. For the platform to thrive, Premium must continuously justify its price — especially for younger, price-sensitive audiences who are navigating independent lifestyles for the first time.
Through user interviews and surveys, I focused on young adults aged 18–24 from a middle-class background — Spotify's most active and most at-risk demographic. Music is central to how they form and express their identity. They are active on social media and navigating new social and financial independence.
"I would want more artist/genre/community based customization and interaction."
"I would say it's a little expensive, I am on a family plan which is why it's okay."
Users want community and identity expression through music, but Spotify forces them off-platform to find it. The absence of integrated social features is a direct threat to Premium retention — especially once family plan eligibility ends.
Spotify was built as a utility — a streaming engine. Its core experience is optimized around discovery and playback, not connection. As a result, there is an absence of integrated social and interactive features within the app.
This isn't a surface-level UX problem. It reflects a fundamental product gap: Spotify has invested heavily in the music side of the experience but has not built the social infrastructure that makes music a shared, living, communal activity.
Using RICE prioritization (Reach, Impact, Confidence, Effort), I evaluated four candidate solutions before converging on the one with the highest strategic leverage.
A dedicated Community Tab to serve as Spotify's social home — bringing all social interaction into a single, native destination. Users never have to leave the app to share, discover, or connect.
Rather than building the full feature set at once, I scoped a focused MVP designed to validate the core hypothesis: do users actually want to share music with friends inside Spotify?
The MVP deliberately avoids real-time messaging to minimize backend infrastructure burden and content moderation risk. Reactions and likes deliver social proof with far lower engineering cost.
Before recommending the solution to stakeholders, I stress-tested it across two dimensions: business viability and technical complexity.
I defined three north star metrics — each designed to isolate the specific impact of the Community Tab rather than mixing signals with other product changes.
A phased rollout designed to de-risk the launch: build and validate the MVP in the first 10 weeks, then iterate toward the full feature set.
Presenting to a panel of real PMs and directors pushed me to think more rigorously about every assumption. Here's what stuck with me.
Wireframes and flows for the Community Tab MVP, built to demonstrate the end-to-end user experience.
View Live Demo