Design a new feature in Audiobooks that helps creators achieve better outcomes at global scale

Problem Statement Description

Product context: Spotify is an audio streaming company; its products include music, podcasts, audiobooks, playlists, recommendations, creator tools, subscriptions, and ads.

Spotify is expanding beyond music and podcasts into audiobooks, where creators, authors, narrators, publishers, and rights holders need better ways to reach listeners, grow audiences, and understand performance across global markets. In this product design question, you are asked to design a new Audiobooks feature that improves creator outcomes at global scale.

Focus on the creator-side experience, not only the listener experience. Consider the end-to-end workflow a creator may go through: publishing or distributing an audiobook, understanding audience demand, improving discovery, monetizing effectively, engaging listeners, and deciding what to create or promote next. The solution should fit Spotify’s broader strengths in personalization, discovery, audio consumption, and creator tools.

This is a hard product design question, so you should clarify the creator segment you are prioritizing, define what “better outcomes” means, and make thoughtful trade-offs between creator needs, listener quality, business impact, and global scalability. Avoid assuming all creators have the same resources, catalog size, languages, rights, or marketing capabilities.

The experience should consider:

- Which audiobook creators or partners you are designing for, such as independent authors, narrators, publishers, or established studios

- The key pain points in today’s audiobook creation, distribution, discovery, analytics, and monetization workflows

- How global differences in language, pricing, rights, culture, listening behavior, and market maturity affect the product experience

- How the feature could leverage Spotify’s personalization, recommendation, and cross-format audio ecosystem

- What creator actions the product should enable before, during, and after an audiobook launch

- How success would be measured for creators, listeners, and Spotify without degrading trust or listening quality

- What constraints may exist around rights management, content quality, localization, payments, and platform fairness

Your goal is to frame a meaningful creator problem, identify a high-impact opportunity within Spotify Audiobooks, and design a product experience that can help creators achieve measurable outcomes while scaling across markets and maintaining a strong listener experience.