Spotify CHRO Katarina Berg on why the company has launched a HR people analytics solution
UNLEASH gets the exclusive first insight into what the music streaming giant’s own human analytics platform Disco brings to the HR market. Hear from CHRO, Katarina Berg, and Global Head of HR Insight & HRIS, Gary Munro.
Music streaming giant Spotify has been dancing to the beat of its own human analytics platform since 2020.
Now the $14 billion revenue organization is set to bring Disco to HR leaders elsewhere with its own take on how people analytics can work.
UNLEASH spoke exclusively to CHRO Katarina Berg, and Global Head of HR Insight & HRIS, Gary Munro, to get the inside track on Disco.
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Spotify is unleashing Disco to the HR community – not the dance music genre, but its proprietary human analytics solution.
Similarly to other organizations that have built and implemented their own in-house HR systems, like neobank Revolut, the music streaming giant has developed a proprietary system that it is now bringing to market.
Spotify has been using Disco internally since 2020 as a single, trusted source for all people-related metrics for both HR and all employees.
Speaking exclusively to UNLEASH, Spotify CHRO Katarina Berg details that “almost immediately, transactional requests to the team stopped—no more ad-hoc requests for datasets, dashboards, or reports.”
“Instead, Disco freed the team to focus on high-value work that drives our most important people initiatives,” Berg says.
“Now, HRBPs can, in the moment, open Disco to provide an initiated answer to a very specific question with data and insight, and/or recommend business development strategies—where to go, where to grow, how to optimize costs, and assess talent density.”
Berg adds that this allows them to be both more informed and confident in factors that move Spotify forward beyond people-related KPIs.
Spotify’s Global Head of HR Insight & HRIS Gary Munro explains to UNLEASH that the streaming platform, which boasts 640 million monthly users, built Disco because “nothing in the market matched our ambitions.”
“At Spotify, data has always been at the heart of what we do, and our people data is no exception. We needed a platform that could unlock its full potential while evolving at the pace of our company,” Munro details.
Reimagining what people analytics looks like and how it can work
The inspiration for Disco derived from Spotify’s main platform, enabling the company to reimagine what a people analytics platform could look like and how it functions.
Munro says there were “clear parallels” between what great data products should be and “what Spotify does best – connecting people with the content they love.”
Instead of traditional dashboards, Disco uses playlists. That may sound like a small shift, but it represents a completely different philosophy—one that makes data more intuitive, accessible, and actionable,” Munro explains.
The response with Spotify’s HR teams to the reimagined analytics system was “incredible,” Berg adds, recognizing what the platform could support their conversations with business leaders.
When it came to training HR on the new platform, Spotify took a “bold approach” – in that it didn’t carry out any after implementing Disco internally.
“Our belief was that if Disco truly reflected the simplicity and intuitiveness of the Spotify experience, it wouldn’t need training,” Berg states.
“Just like the Spotify app, it should be instantly usable from the moment you start.”
Munro explains that although Disco was built to meet internal needs at Spotify, the reception from organizations that were given a glimpse of it “was the same: ‘When can we buy this?’ That demand is what led us to bring Disco to market.”
He says that Spotify isn’t going to compare Disco to similar systems already available in the market “or make bold claims – we believe the HR tech space has seen enough of that. Too often, big promises fail to deliver real value.”
Spotify is currently open to registrations for its early-adopted program and Berg says that they are “not thinking that far ahead at the moment” in terms of a long-term vision of Disco, instead focusing on the “enthusiastic requests” from the market.
“This is our way of meeting the needs of our network for an HR insights tool that we have grown to love and depend on,” Berg concludes.
For the time being, as the Swedes would say “vi håller tummarna”, or we’ll hold our thumbs and see how the sign-ups go.”
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John Brazier is an experienced and award-winning B2B journalist and editor, with a strong track record of hosting conferences, webinars, roundtables and video products. He has a keen interest in emerging technologies within the HR space, as well as wellbeing and employee experience topics. Prior to joining UNLEASH, John both led and wrote for various global and domestic financial services publications, including COVER Magazine, The TRADE, and WatersTechnology.
Get in touch via email: john@unleash.ai