Speaker: Mareike Keller (Product Designer at Spotify)
Title: Designing What to Play Next
Consumer audio products are deeply personal, culturally embedded, and used in both active and passive ways throughout everyday life. Designing them means balancing user needs, business goals, and the technical realities of building at scale, while thinking carefully about discovery, personalization, engagement across different content types, and the problem at the center of many listening experiences: helping people decide what to play next.
At Spotify, I work on the consumer mobile app as a Product Designer, helping shape features that guide how users discover music and other audio content. This talk draws from my own experience designing for a consumer product in music technology: how designers collaborate with engineers, product managers, researchers, and data scientists, how user needs shape work across different audio formats, and how ideas move through research, prototyping, and iteration before becoming shipped product experiences. I will also reflect on how AI is opening up new possibilities for recommendation, control, and interaction, while introducing new ways of prototyping and exploring ideas in a product category where personalization is already central to the listener experience.
Mareike Keller is a Product Designer at Spotify, where she works on the core consumer experience across Browse, Search, Home, Audiobooks, Playlists, and more. Her work has included Spotify’s first Author Pages, systems for upcoming release discovery, and newer experiences at the intersection of human judgment and AI. She has a background in experimental psychology from Columbia University, with a focus on decision-making, human-computer interaction, and voice interfaces. Before Spotify, she worked on channel pages at YouTube, social experiences at Blizzard Entertainment, and product development at early-stage startups. She is also an active DJ.