BACKGROUND AND IMPACT

During my second year at Spotify, I created a series of short infographic-based animation videos for C-suite executives explaining how the core tech stacks work (e.g. how content and value travels through the backend system), which brought important knowledge, that used to be available only to a group of engineers, to all stakeholders, and went viral internally. Now they are even part of the new employee onboarding.

They helped to change crucial company strategies and brought PlayX Studio, which takes care of the core tech stack, the recognition they long deserved. The videos are now included in the onboarding for new employees, including even designers.

I believe this is the most impactful and ground-breaking work I have done in Spotify.

Unfortunately, these videos couldn’t be shared outside Spotify. When I complained about this situation to an Engineering Director, he said: “showing it to people outside of Spotify is not as important as the reviews from your colleagues. If people have never experienced the pain of not understanding something for 17 years and you managed to explain it in 7 minutes, they would just think it is easy. But it is not easy. You made it easy.”

THE “HOW“

Many of my Spotify colleagues wrote long endorsements on my LinkedIn profile. There is one that explains particularly well why the videos made the impact they made:

“A large organization like Spotify has a lot of complex moving parts. Ask 4 people how any system works and you’ll get 5 answers, hopefully with some commonality. These videos demystify and codify how the guts of these systems work. The videos manage to do so in a way that is succinct enough for executives to make high-level decisions but also deep enough to give engineers fuel for imagining what should happen next. Rather than have large projects turn into buzzwords and jargon that get thrown around, these videos bring clarity and direction.”
– Jonathan Dumm, Senior Data Scientist at Spotify

I asked my colleagues in Spotify and none of them has ever seen a piece of work like this during their entire career. When I analyze why these videos are so efficient in conveying the message, I believe it is because I used a lot of metaphors – fitting metaphors can effectively leverage what we already understand to make new learning happen almost instantly.

The metaphor has to be good, otherwise it can mislead people and have the opposite effect. So what makes a good metaphor? It needs to make perfect sense both logically and emotionally. And this is exactly where I thrive – the intersection of logic and humanness.

With two Master of Science degrees, by default, I think in logical terms. I used to code, which makes understanding how technology works relatively easy even though I am a designer. On the other hand, I also have a graphical mind and highly-sensitive empathy. With strong traits from both sides, it is intuitive for me to communicate with fitting metaphors.

TASTE HOW I COMMUNICATE WITH METAPHORS

In order to understand how effectively I can communicate, one needs to understand and relate to the problem first. Here is a video – even though with a completely different topic and style – that can serve as a gateway to understand how I use metaphors to communicate hard problems and use infographics to condense information. It also shows how I talk to people’s logical mind and their emotions, which help me deliver what I want my audience to understand and remember into their hearts.

This video is about humanness, and the style is intentionally childlike, hence disarming, while the Spotify video is about the logic of a machine, and the style is sleek and rational, which caters to people who work in tech companies.

With this 3 min video, my goal is to persuade well-educated, and high-functioning people to start learning about psychology, which is something I have never seen anyone succeed in doing. You can be my judge to see if I have succeeded:

RAVING REVIEWS FROM SPOITFY COLLEAGUES

Because the videos are for internal viewing only, I can’t show them outside of Spotify. To understand its impact, one can get a glimpse from the words of my Spotify colleagues:

“Gu produced multiple visualizations of different aspects of our current systems, planned future direction, as well as animated video walkthroughs that managed to successfully explain an incredible depth of information while being accessible and meaningful to everyone from engineers to senior business executives. These materials went above and beyond my expectations and have since become invaluable communication tools for our teams. I was extremely impressed with Gu’s ability to research and understand such a complex technology domain in a short amount of time, and turn that into a series of visual analogies and narratives that anyone could relate to.”

– Brandi Shew

Head of PlayX Studio at Spotify

“I had the opportunity to collaborate directly with Gu on one project where we needed to present a lot of complex information in an accessible and easily understandable way towards a wide audience. She took this open and ambiguous task and, through a series of interviews, analysis and multiple quick iterations, delivered a set of engaging, well-structured and nicely narrated videos. These videos were highly praised by everyone in the organisation for being easy to understand, engaging and for creating clarity. They brought new depths of meaning to a number of people. I was in awe seeing how quickly and gracefully Gu was able to create powerful storytelling through her videos that truly touched people in the organisation. Her ability to translate intricate concepts into meaningful stories is unparalleled.”

– Marcin Floryan
Engineering Director of Media
Playback and Delivery at Spotify

“Gu produced a series of videos within Spotify that documented and detailed the architectural labyrinth a media file journeys through from creator to consumer. These videos explained, in a remarkably accessible way, a set of extremely technical topics — touching on the client side and backend services/APIs that power the Spotify playback machine.”

– Calab Fleming
Senior Data Science Manager at Spotify

“The videos Gu crafted not only provided a perfect summary of the project but also exhibited a level of appeal that transcended the boundaries of project stakeholders. Even for those not directly involved, the video was a captivating showcase of our collective efforts. Gu's talent for incorporating engaging animations and maintaining an energetic rhythm, despite the technical nature of the subject matter, made the content not just informative but genuinely fun to watch.”

– Miguel Gómez Limmert 

Senior Product Manager at Spotify

“She helped my team with storytelling and visualization of a large technical strategy that we initially had struggled explaining to internal stakeholder teams as it was very large and technically complex. Gu created visualizations and a short video explaining the concepts in a very easy to understand way. The result was mind-blowing! She managed to break down a complex technical topic into easy to understand and memorable concepts using a nice visual design. Her work not only clarified our mission but also resonated widely within the company, with her video garnering widespread attention.”

– Anna Guth
Engineering Lead at Spotify

“Her communication and story telling skills are all super powers that shined through in both these occasions. When consulted for technical input, I was impressed by the depth of her questions and how fast she would build up an accurate mental model of the technical aspects of the Spotify playback systems, which she then together with great storytelling, materialised into easily consumable, illustrative videos.”

– Erik Brodberg 

Senior Engineer at Spotify

“While working with Gu I got to know and see how talking to people’s emotions is a game changer and so worth it even for internal projects. Thank you Gu for opening my eyes to the power of video.”

– Samuel Erdtman
Senior Product Manager