From Voice Queries to Soundchecks: A Day with Spotify Group Product Manager Ajay Kalia
Ajay Kalia is a Group Product Manager on Spotify’s Voice team, based in the company’s Boston office since it first opened. His work sits at the intersection of human and AI experiences, where the goal is helping listeners discover music through voice assistants, both in the Spotify app and on smart speakers. Kalia’s role means juggling strategy, engineering discussions, and user research, often all before lunch.
In a typical morning, Kalia’s time can be split among data scientists and user researchers analyzing feature reactions, engineers wrestling with technical problems, or other product managers mapping out long-term strategy. The core challenge in the voice space, he explains, is the inherent ambiguity of natural language. A request like “play work from home” is a perfect example: is the user asking for the Fifth Harmony song of that name, or the Rihanna track “Work” being played on a speaker named “Home”?
Resolving that ambiguity sits at the crossroads of linguistics, technology, and personalization. Kalia’s team recently tested a new strategy for handling these cases on a small slice of the audience, with plans to expand it to everyone. This rapid experimentation culture, where small bets are placed and losers are abandoned quickly, beats betting months on a monolithic solution.
Lunch is usually consumed in the building’s 8th-floor cafeteria, though a tricky strategy problem might send Kalia to the office gym instead. For an extra creative boost, he’ll check the office music system, an internal tool built by engineers years ago that lets any employee add tracks to a collaborative queue heard throughout the office. Kalia calls it a go-to discovery source, given the diverse tastes people share.
Afternoons bring more writing, strategic thinking, and time for experiments. One regular practice is Soundchecks, where squads submit prototypes for user research testing and get immediate feedback from six real Spotify listeners. The sessions provide a fast cycle for understanding how people actually use the product, while pushing teams to be scrappy and comfortable with failing fast.
Kalia’s day usually ends between 5:30 and 6:00 PM. He commutes home to his wife and two-year-old son, and intentionally keeps weeknights work-free. Parenthood has reshaped his listening habits, he admits, giving him a renewed appreciation for family-safe artists like The Beatles that entertain both kids and adults.
That level of engagement isn’t something Kalia takes for granted. He appreciates that Spotify’s leadership encourages teams to consider the real-world impact of their work, and that he’s building a product he’d use even if he didn’t work there. It’s part of what has kept him at the company for so long.
