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The Spotify Stars Program: Celebrating Values Week!

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Spotify Community
Spotify Stars

Values Week: Behind the Values

MattSuda

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What’s happening?

This week (24-28 May, 2021), we’re hosting a week full of virtual fun for the members of the Spotify Community’s superuser program - the Spotify Star Program - to celebrate the launch of our brand new Star Program Values!

 

What’s the Star Program?
The Spotify Star Program unites our most engaged and passionate Spotify Community users, bringing them closer to Spotify. Our amazing Stars are volunteers who contribute to the Community and gain advanced permissions and access to private forums, as well as the opportunity to take part in product research and testing. You can find out more here!

 

And the values? Where do they come in?

The Star Program has been around since 2013. And while we’re proud to have built a culture within the Program which is founded on certain shared values (many of which reflect Spotify’s core values), until now we’d never made a definitive set of values which we can proudly present and which can help hold us accountable. 

 

How did you come up with the values?

From the outset, it was important to make this a joint effort involving both the Community team and the Stars themselves. We decided that we wanted to build on the existing Spotify core values, while also making sure that the new values were unique to the Star Program. 

 

As with the Spotify values, we opted for individual words to represent the values accompanied by a short description to add meaning and depth, showing they're more than just words on paper to us.

 

Over the course of several workshops, we explored words that spoke to the spirit of the Program, and then landed on a final 6 which we believed captured the essence of what it means to be a Star in the Program. These are:

 

Respect

Inclusion

Team Work

Support

Fun

Responsibility

 

We then shared these with our Stars to make sure we were getting their feedback and opinions. Then, it was over to the design teams here at Spotify to visually bring everything to life by visually branding the values. They came back to us with several different mockups, and we ultimately settled on this one:

 

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Team Work.png

 

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Responsibility.png

 

What do these values mean to the Stars?

 

Here are some reflections from some of our Stars about the meaning behind the words:

 

@MattSuda says:

“I think the new Star values set the standard on what mindset to have when interacting with Spotify users, fellow Stars, and Spotify staff. These values are our guiding star and what the heart of the program is all about. By following these values the Stars can shine their brightest in the Star program.”

@Hubo says:
“I’m glad we have these values to make sure we’re all on one line to make the best program ever! It’s nice to make decisions with these principles at our core. I think it really helps the team morale to have a shared vision/idea.”

 

@AdamDam says:
“Members of the Star program tend to be relatively active in the Community, so I think it’s important for us to keep these values in mind to help promote a fun and inclusive environment that respects everyone. By working together, we can learn by example to more effectively support fellow Community members and uphold our responsibility of representing Spotify and the Star program.”

 

Coming up with a set of meaningful values took us time and happened over several stages. Values Week is a chance for the Star Program to come together virtually and celebrate them in style with some fun events, including a coffee chat, a pet hangout, and a listening party.


Sound like your kind of jam? Learn more about the Star Program and get involved!

5 Comments
Hubo

Awesome kick-off of Values Week, Matt!! Thanks for sharing this 😄🙌

Jose_M

Great post!

robigouk

Sounds interesting! 🙂 

Melody

Amazing post, great work authoring it @MattSuda and @Peter !
So excited to be a part of Values Week with you all.

blvckvv

Do you clowns ever plan on fixing anything ever? Are you even capable? NO.