Outro and optimism

We've reached the outro. My double album with the Spotify band is coming to an end. And I'm more optimistic than ever about the future: I'm joining Intercom, the company I believe will change Customer Service as we know it.

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I enjoyed my time at Spotify so much that I had two tenures here: one from 2019-2020 and one from 2021-2024. In practice, it worked out to be very much like a double album. Two parts that felt incomplete without one another, as if they were split merely due to artistic preference or a limitation of the medium.

The organisation I left in 2020 was the same one I came back to in 2021, but to support a new team – I had previously led Commerce Fraud Prevention and came back to lead Customer Service. A lot of it felt very familiar to me. My peers and my manager were all people I had worked with before. The day-to-day hadn't changed that much. I was familiar even with the harder things to grasp: culture, values, belief systems.

"What made you come back?" was, by far, the question I heard the most in my "second-first" six months. It came up from peers, friends, family, and even candidates during interviews. My starting point of the answer has always been that Spotify is a special place, and I had a tingling feeling that I'd come back in due time. I left knowing that something was still unfinished.

I was right: in my second tenure, Spotify offered me the learnings I needed.

Thanks to my team, I was reminded of the true importance of being kind, especially amid adversity. That many teams have competence, but it's only the truly great ones that care enough, regardless of how hard the situation is, to leave things and people better than you found them.

Thanks to the product and business teams, I learned how Customer Service is broad and deep, objective and subjective... nuanced from the top to the bottom of the funnel. I was reminded that in engineering, nothing beats "shipping it".

Thanks to our partners and vendors, I was reminded that trust is a response to trustworthiness. That success in the long game is contingent to making things right for everyone around you.

Thank you, Spotify.

As to what's next, I've never been as optimistic about the future as I am.

While there's a lot of scepticism on how much AI/LLMs will change different industries, it's glaringly obvious that Customer Service is ripe for disruption.

I believe Intercom will lead the charge – and I'm fortunate enough to join them in a few days!