May 19, 2026

Personalization in the Era of LLMs - Shivam Verma, Spotify

Spotify is personalizing open-weight LLMs without full fine-tuning by combining three key components: foundational user embeddings from streaming history, 'Semantic IDs' that tokenize its 100M+ item catalog, and a 'soft tokenization' layer that projects a user's embedding directly into the LLM's context. This allows the model to autoregressively generate the next song or podcast as the next token in a sequence.

Sep 28, 2025

A 4-step framework for building delightful products | Nesrine Changuel (Spotify, Google, Skype)

Nesrine Changuel, a former product leader at Spotify and Google, presents a pragmatic framework for building delightful products. She argues that delight is not a superficial add-on but a core business strategy that drives retention and differentiation by creating products that serve both functional and emotional needs. The summary covers her three pillars of delight, a four-step model for implementation, the 50-40-10 rule for prioritization, and real-world examples from her time at Chrome, Google Meet, and Spotify.