Resolve a cross-functional conflict blocking Discover Weekly 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’s Discover Weekly is a flagship personalized music discovery experience for premium subscribers, with high expectations for freshness, relevance, reliability, and global availability. Imagine a major global-scale improvement or rollout is being blocked by conflict across functions—for example between personalization/ML, licensing, infrastructure, regional markets, creator/label partnerships, marketing, legal, or consumer product teams.

You are the PM responsible for getting the initiative unstuck and moving it toward launch without compromising user trust, music relevance, business goals, or operational stability. The conflict may involve competing priorities such as recommendation quality, regional catalog constraints, compute cost, launch timing, creator exposure, subscriber retention, or risk tolerance across markets.

This is an execution-focused question. The interviewer is looking for how you would diagnose the conflict, align stakeholders, create an operating plan, manage dependencies, define launch readiness, and communicate trade-offs clearly under pressure.

The experience should consider:

- The specific user impact for premium subscribers if Discover Weekly quality, freshness, or availability is delayed or degraded

- The cross-functional owners involved and where decision rights should sit

- Key dependencies across ML/recommendations, content licensing, platform reliability, localization, analytics, marketing, and regional teams

- How you would sequence work, unblock decisions, and create clear milestones

- Go/no-go criteria for a global or phased rollout, including quality, reliability, engagement, and retention signals

- Launch risks such as poor recommendations, regional catalog gaps, infrastructure failures, creator/label concerns, or negative subscriber sentiment

- Communication mechanisms for executives, partner teams, and frontline launch stakeholders

- Rollback, mitigation, and post-launch monitoring plans if the rollout creates user or business harm

Your goal is to describe how you would lead the team from conflict to execution: clarify the problem, align on priorities, build an accountable plan, manage risks, and ensure Discover Weekly can scale globally in a way that supports Spotify’s personalization promise, creator ecosystem, and premium subscriber retention.