BACKGROUND AND IMPACT

Spotify's backend is one of the most complex content delivery systems ever built — it handles how a piece of content travels through transcoding, encryption, and global distribution to become sound in a consumer's ears, and how royalty payments travel back to the creators.

It is crucial to Spotify’s success, yet it remained deep engineering knowledge that almost nobody outside the technical teams could understand.

With no precedent or template, I conducted 20+ interviews with engineers 👆, built an infographic-based mental model of the entire system from scratch, and translated it into short videos that made 17 years of engineer-only knowledge accessible to every stakeholder at Spotify — including designers, lawyers, and executives.

They helped C-suite executives to change crucial company strategies, enabled PMs to collaborate effectively, and brought backend teams the recognition they long deserved.

The key video remains referenced and is now featured at the top of the onboarding page for all new employees, shaping the intellectual infrastructure of Spotify going forward.

The “How“ – find a fitting metaphor and make it visual

This project was also a turning point for me personally. It was here that I discovered my own specific ability — to take complex data and logic, find the structural metaphor that makes it a felt understanding, and translate it into a narrative that motivates and changes behaviour.

When the metaphor is exactly right, invisible truth becomes immediately and permanently obvious.

Example

A rectangle labelled "Player" 👆 tells you what something is called. It does nothing to tell you what it is. And humans don't understand things through labels — we understand through recognition.

When the Player became a 3D box with a vinyl record inside, suddenly, you don't need to be an engineer to grasp it. You've seen a record player. You know what it does. You know it takes something in and produces sound. The technical complexity is still there — but now it's wearing a form your brain already recognises.

That is what I meant by “making the invisible visible”. The technical reality of Spotify's backend hadn't changed; what changed was the representational layer — the metaphor through which people could finally see it.

What my SPOITFY COLLEAGUES said about these videos

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.”

“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

A taste of the method

Since the Spotify videos are for internal viewing only, I can't share them here. But the method that made them work — finding the structural metaphor that makes invisible truth immediately and permanently obvious — is the same method I apply here in my passion project video below.

The goal is to persuade well-educated, high-functioning people to start therapy without a crisis, which is arguably one of the hardest behaviour changes in self-development, because there is no obvious trigger, no urgency, and enormous stigma.