Make a Podcast to Build for Podcasters: Maya Prohovnik on Dogfooding, Gut Calls and Anchor's Unscalable Hacks

Host Lenny Rachitsky opens by noting that Prohovnik leads podcast product at Spotify, which she says now holds over a third of global podcast listening, and that more than 75% of new shows are hosted with Spotify for Podcasters, the product formerly known as Anchor. A colleague, Wilma Chu, told him the first thing to ask about was dogfooding, so they start there.

Prohovnik has four podcasts of her own. The first was about Stephen King books, which she started when she joined Anchor because she knew nothing about production or what it felt like to be a creator. Another is a weekly Big Brother show with her husband, recorded entirely on a phone with almost no editing, which has survived six or seven years thanks to a community of callers. She also made a niche show about the novel *Children of Time* and a parenting podcast.

She says dogfooding is simply her natural state, shaped by starting her career in customer support and by building tools for people whose livelihood depends on them. Looking at a list of feature requests, she argues, is not the same as feeling a problem, and her product managers who finally start a show tell her they now understand what creators need. She also keeps a mental playbook for would-be podcasters: record with a friend, do not follow a script, and do not publish a 30-second test and call it done.

To keep the habit alive, her team elevates colleagues who have their own shows, builds podcast creation into offsites, and she personally listens to every show her team makes. She admits she once DMed an engineer about an iOS bug at nine at night after recording, and the fix shipped the next day. She is also known for talking nearly everyone she meets into starting a podcast, one person at a time.

Prohovnik thinks product management has grown more formal and scientific, with teams so focused on frameworks and roadmaps that they build things without thinking about the end user. She loves Spotify's insights team and says data is hugely valuable, but warns against relying on it alone. The trouble starts when a process like running the same insights study for every feature replaces judgment.

She describes a healthier flow: form a hypothesis informed by data, do user research and try a few things, then set success metrics before launch. Different kinds of data suit different moments, and the PM's job is to choose among them. In her view the creative part of the role sits inside that loop rather than outside it.

Moving from a 20-person startup to a large organization taught her that being gut-driven does not mean telling people "I told you so." At Spotify she has to influence many people outside her team, so she explains as objectively as she can why her gut feels the way it does, citing past experience, her own use of the product and user stories. Projects pushed through over everyone's disagreement are, she says, doomed from the start.

Anchor 1.0 was a voice messaging and short-form product, comparable to the Clubhouse rebrand, and people loved it: users stayed up all night, met and even married through it, and the numbers were healthy. Prohovnik and CEO Mike Mignano still felt it would never be big enough for their original goal of democratizing audio. Version 2.0 moved toward content creation, a kind of personal radio station, and she says the decision was made largely on gut and was painful for loyal 1.0 users.

Building a whole new app took a few months, during which the team doubted itself and felt guilty ignoring user requests. Once 2.0 launched, numbers shot up and new kinds of people arrived. The lesson she draws is to tell signal from noise: the team used an 80/20 rule, building for the broad majority rather than the loudest 20%, and she says you must be willing to "kill your darlings."

The second pivot ran the other way. Anchor had avoided the word "podcast" and used nautical terms like waves, but the top request was to export episodes as a podcast. After resisting for around six months, the team tested a small export feature, and the data showed the start of its hockey-stick growth. They then rebuilt the app around RSS and podcasting.

Prohovnik concludes that the mission, democratizing the medium, was the only thing that stayed fixed while everything else was negotiable. She credits her co-founders for sticking to that goal through the acquisition, and notes that you never know which tiny product change will become an existential moment for the business.

One of Anchor's early principles was to build things that don't scale. Distributing a podcast meant proving ownership of an RSS feed, sometimes handling 301 redirects, and having an Apple ID, which many people do not have. The team was obsessed with reducing that friction.

Their solution was to hire college interns, whom Prohovnik stresses were well paid. A creator would press one button in the app, and the interns would do all the manual work behind the scenes. People assume Anchor had a secret deal with Apple, but it was students creating Apple accounts and submitting hundreds of thousands of podcasts through them.

The packaging mattered as much as the mechanics. Promising a human response within three days would not have felt magical, while a button that put you on Apple Podcasts about 24 hours later was a huge benefit over commoditized rivals. She believes it was a major reason Anchor won hosting share so quickly, and she urges product teams to answer silly ideas with "yes, and" instead of "no, because." One of those interns is now a PM on her team.

Prohovnik calls Anchor's integration into Spotify a mix of luck and hard work. Both companies faced a chicken-and-egg marketplace problem, with creators on one side and listeners on the other, and both wanted a more democratized, two-way podcasting future. Anchor was about 20 people at the time, and she notes that Spotify had already grown into a company that still makes bold strategic shifts quickly.

Her team deliberately avoided getting lost in the large organization by doing lots of internal marketing, building relationships with every team and constantly offering help. When Spotify's strategy shifted, which she says has happened dozens of times in almost five years, they stayed excited and useful without blindly following. Lenny adds that even performing enthusiasm and then steering things in the right direction is effective.

The team has slowed somewhat, since Spotify's idea of a "small" project was about a quarter, but it kept its four core values, one of which is to move fast. She recalls that Daniel Ek told the team he did not want them to slow down and that he wanted them to help teach the rest of Spotify to move faster. She now sees her job as pushing back on unnecessary things that slow people down.

Ek's advice at the time was to say no to meetings and keep being Anchor for a year. Prohovnik says that worked on speed but backfired on belonging, because the team did not build relationships and felt detached from Spotify's mission. The next phase involved integrating deeply, even dropping the Anchor name internally, accepting that closer embedding means slower progress.

She also speaks candidly about something she thinks is rarely discussed: founders who get acquired often go through a deep depression and existential crisis. She did not expect it, since the exit was objectively good for the team, users and the industry. After meeting other acquired founders, she believes everyone must decide either to commit to making a big company work for them or to leave and start something new, and that there is too little support for this transition.

Lenny shares that he had a similar feeling after selling his company to Airbnb, where he ended up staying seven years. Prohovnik says she underestimated how much of her purpose came from the daily survival of a startup, and her fear of being a cog in a wheel faded once she saw she could still run her team her way. Knowing your core values, she concludes, lets you take them with you.

Her favorite leadership book is *Radical Candor*, which she requires all of her managers to read. Its core is to care personally and challenge directly, since doing only one gives ineffective feedback. She has come to see feedback as a gift and to view underperformance as usually a role mismatch, which lets her frame hard conversations around helping someone find the right next step, even if that is outside her team.

The only other framework she leans on is the Eisenhower Matrix, or the four Ds: do, defer, delegate, delete. She skips the grid and runs it as a to-do list in Todoist, going through everything at the end of each day before she lets herself stop working. Getting tasks out of her head matters because deep thinking and problem solving are impossible while she is juggling a list mentally. Lenny recommends *Getting Things Done* and its "mind like water" idea.

Prohovnik says she once decided in high school that she simply would not hate public speaking, after losing sleep over a presentation. Her biggest tip now is to reframe the anxiety as adrenaline preparing you to perform, and to let it wash over you rather than fight it. She also finds that rehearsing at least ten full run-throughs once the notes are final lets her adjust jokes and awkward wording.

She suggests experimenting to find which note style works, whether full sentences or bullets, aiming to be able to ad-lib around half of the material, and maintaining eye contact. Her unfair advantage, she says, is genuinely caring about her topic, since audiences can tell. Personal stories and a bit of humor help too.

Looking ahead, she says Spotify's strategy still centers on its audience of more than 500 million monthly active listeners. She calls discovery and audience growth the biggest problem to solve for podcasters, alongside monetization so creators of all sizes can make a living and more interactive formats. She declines to give specifics but promises more next year.