Spotlight began as a digital version of a friend’s Song of the Day whiteboard. The initial idea was intentionally small: give everyone one song to share each day and preserve the ritual when we were no longer in the same physical space.
Then people used it differently than I expected. They wanted to react, leave context, revisit older picks and save songs directly to Spotify. Those behaviours were not failures of the first design. They were evidence about what the product actually meant to its users.
The useful lesson was to separate the product’s essential ritual from my assumptions about how people would perform it. The one-song constraint stayed. The surrounding experience evolved through observation, feedback and repeated use.
A roadmap created in isolation can look very convincing. A small product in real hands is usually more honest.