Maya Prohovnik
Maya Prohovnik is currently Spotify’s Head of Podcast Product. She was employee #1 at Anchor, which was acquired by Spotify in 2019 and now powers more than 80% of all new podcasts created in the world. In 2023, Maya was named one of the Most Important People in Podcasting by The Hollywood Reporter.
Discovery & Research Skills
Direct product immersion transforms abstract data into a deep understanding of user needs, enabling more effective tool-building for complex user workflows.
"If they talk to users all the time, they see the data, but all of them, once they finally start doing their podcast, they're like, I get it. Something clicked and now I feel like I really understand w..."
Personal empathy for user pain points enables product leaders to prioritize features more effectively than relying on raw feature requests or long-term strategic goals alone.
"And so I think if you're just looking at a list of feature requests, you're not necessarily going to prioritize it in the same way as if you deeply feel those problems."
Growth & Retention Skills
Validating a "magical" user experience through manual, unscalable labor allows you to capture market share before investing in expensive technical automation.
"We were obsessed with reducing friction, this was our constant battle. And so we hired a couple of college interns and we brought them in and we were like, people are going to push this magical one bu..."