Dogfooding Your Way to
Product Leadership

Maya Prohovnik

Head of Product, Podcasting at Spotify (Anchor)

Lenny's Podcast

The Philosophy

Why Dogfooding Matters for Product Leaders

"I don't know how you can build tools for creators if you don't understand that mindset. Once they finally start doing their podcast, they're like, I get it. Something clicked and now I feel like I really understand what they need."

You must become your own user to truly understand user pain
Using your own product reveals problems data and interviews never will
Empathy for creators is not optional, it's your competitive advantage
This applies to any product serving creatives or entrepreneurs

In Practice

Maya's Four Podcasts & What She Learned

active podcasts

5K+

listeners per ep (Stephen King)

Stephen King Book Club

Her OG show. Got to 5K listeners before life got busy. Taught her production and SEO. Still gets emails asking her to bring it back.

Big Brother Pod (w/ husband)

7 years running. Fully mobile-first, minimal editing, community-driven. The community keeps it alive, not production quality.

Children of Time (niche deep dive)

Got ~25 listeners. Highly spoiler-heavy. Proved that niche, highly specific podcasts find their audience.

Parenting Journey Pod

Her newest. Documenting fertility, IVF, childbirth, and toddler life. Raw, honest, deeply personal.

The creator mindsetWhen you don't know if anyone's listening, if you don't know what they like, if you don't know if they're coming back, it's so hard to keep investing. Community matters more than polish.

Playbook

How to Get Your Team Dogfooding

Make it visible: Elevate team members who have podcasts. Tell their stories internally.
Use your own product: Test features constantly. DM engineers about bugs at 9 PM.
Create barriers-to-entry awareness: Build onboarding from your pain, not from theory.
Listen to everything they make: At minimum, they'll get one listener. That matters.
Share a creator playbook: "Don't record alone. Don't use a script. Feel the pain so you understand it."

The conversation converter

Maya pitches podcasting at every opportunity. Job interviews, parties, random convos. She works through every objection until they start.

The key metric

You're not measuring show success. You're measuring team growth in product understanding and empathy.

Maya's pitchIt's not about becoming a creator. It's about building better tools by living your users' reality.

Growth Hack

The Magical Button That Won Anchor's Market

"We had college students making Apple Podcast accounts and submitting hundreds of thousands of podcasts. I still don't know how many people know this. People think we had a secret backdoor deal with Apple. We just had interns doing it manually, but to users it felt magical."

Don't optimize for scale before you optimize for delight
Do the unscalable thing first to understand what matters
One-click distribution felt "magical" = word-of-mouth growth
Remarkable experiences are shared; average ones aren't

The unscalable pathThat intern-powered distribution became Anchor's biggest competitive advantage. It taught them what truly matters to creators: speed and magic over complexity.

Contrarian

What Maya Gets Right About Product

✗Dogfooding is nice-to-haveINSTEAD →✓ Dogfooding is non-negotiable. Your team won't build right products without becoming users.

✗Follow the roadmapINSTEAD →✓ Stay excited about what changes. The best founders shift with strategy while keeping mission alive.

✗Do the scalable thing firstINSTEAD →✓ Do the unscalable, magical thing first. Scale later. Delight beats efficiency early.

✗Acquisitions slow you downINSTEAD →✓ Acquisitions work if the acquirer shares your mission and you stay vocal about your value.