Warner Music VP of Product Design on Design thinking and mystical practices for business breakthroughs | Christina Goldschmidt | E254

In this episode, Carlos Gonzalez de Villaumbrosia interviews Christina Goldschmidt, VP of Product Design at Warner Music.

Warner Music is one of the world's leading music companies, serving artists and songwriters across various labels and publishing divisions. With a rich history in the music industry, Warner Music has evolved to embrace digital transformation, offering innovative ways for fans to engage with artists and music.

Christina leads the entire UX team at Warner Music, overseeing product designers, design systems specialists, visual designers, content designers, researchers, and design operations. Her team designs experiences connecting fans to artists, provides services to artists and songwriters, and creates internal tools that power various aspects of the music business, from distribution to sync licensing and royalties reporting.

In this episode, we'll explore Christina's unique approach to product design, how she and her team are leveraging unconventional practices to drive innovation, and the future of music technology. We'll discuss strategies for aligning design with business goals, structuring design teams for interconnected ecosystems, and balancing zero-to-one initiatives with product improvements.

What you'll learn:
- Christina's journey from front-end developer to VP of Product Design at Warner Music and her insights on the company's digital transformation.
- The challenges and strategies involved in creating user experiences for a global music company.
- How to prioritize design initiatives and innovations in a fast-paced, artist-centric environment.
- The future of music technology, including AI-powered tools and immersive fan experiences.

Key Takeaways👇:
- Design as a Revenue Driver: Christina emphasizes the importance of positioning design as a strategic asset that contributes to business growth.
- Unconventional Problem-Solving: Warner Music is pushing boundaries by incorporating mystical practices like tarot readings and shamanic journeying into their design thinking process.
- Data-Driven Design: Christina highlights the use of product discovery, UX research, and business metrics to guide design decisions and improvements

Transcript

Carlos Gonzalez de Villaumbrosia (00:21)
Welcome to the podcast, Cristina.

Christina Goldschmidt (00:22)
Thank you so much, Carlos. I'm so happy to be here.

Carlos Gonzalez de Villaumbrosia (00:24)
I'm happy to have you back to product school. You're an awesome speaker at our last product conference in New York. Your talk was loved by a lot of people. So I thought it would be a good idea to have you here so we can continue dissecting product design at scale at a company such as Warner Music.

Christina Goldschmidt (00:42)
Great, yeah, no, I'm so happy that that was well received.

Carlos Gonzalez de Villaumbrosia (00:46)
So it's not actually common to have designers on our platform, but I think you add so much value and I hope that the audience, mostly product leaders, can continue learning more about how we can better partner with design and make this a revenue driver instead of just what some people consider a cost center. So maybe we can start there. I want to learn more about how you think about design as a revenue driver.

Christina Goldschmidt (01:13)
Absolutely. So one, I think that design needs to make sure that they are always additive to trying to achieve that intersection of user and business goals. And that if design is only thinking about how we can be empathetic to the user, how can we do what the user needs, but not ever have that overlap with what the actual business needs and actually understand the constraints of what's possible with engineering, you can't ever actually justify your existence in a sense. So I always make sure that as I'm a designer who started out as a front end developer in the mid 90s, and then after the downturn of 08, I actually was a product manager for a couple of years. And I think all of that experience has been helpful to be empathetic of how we collaborate cross-functionally to get the job done, right? So for design, starting with the beginning, how do we need to achieve product market fit? What's that thing that's going to make us a differentiator? What's that secret sauce that's going to add extra value that is going to be dramatically different from our competitors that they can't do because they're not us, and that adds something special that's not necessarily replicable? that is going to truly add value to our customers that's gonna drive those business goals. Revenue, cost saving, something like that.

Carlos Gonzalez de Villaumbrosia (02:44)
So this is the time of the year, right? Where a lot of companies are going through budget planning or refreshing their strategy. How do you go about participating in those sessions with product leaders and other peers to ensure that those high level OKRs are connected to the initiative that you are going to be leading?

Christina Goldschmidt (03:05)
Absolutely. It's about making sure that we are all on the same page about what we're trying to achieve. And to be honest, a picture is worth more than a thousand words. That idiom stays true. And I and my team are there to make sure we are rapidly visualizing where we think we want to go so that we are all saying, yes, we think that is going to do the job. And at a company like Warner Music, where tech isn't the whole reason why that company exists, right? We are a record company that has labels and songwriting publishing. Oftentimes we're in support of what they're trying to do to support artists and songwriters. And we have to explain, do our goals, our OKRs, ladder to your goals on the label side and on the publishing side. And when we talk, when we share a PRD, it oftentimes is very confusing. But if I quickly show a sketch, if I quickly show a prototype, we can all say, that makes a lot of sense. And so making sure that that planning process is actually buttressed by real screens, real tangible things that we can talk about, that we can estimate against. That helps us say, does this feel materially different than what somebody else is making? Does this feel like it's going to add value to your artists, to your songwriters, to your customers? And are we all on the same page? This is going to help you, our business partners, meet your goals. Therefore, we will meet our goals. So being at that center of the conversation, making sure everyone's aligned, that's kind of what I try to do every day.

Carlos Gonzalez de Villaumbrosia (04:51)
And let's talk about your org design. I would love to learn more about how you structure it? Is it based on business units, different products? Are there any pods?

Christina Goldschmidt (05:01)
Yeah, so I've been very lucky to work in all kinds of different environments, right? In pod structures, when I was at Etsy, I've actually been in agency life as well. So I've been in all sorts of centralized, decentralized versions and trying to give teams autonomy, we know is what we're trying to do. However, that pod model doesn't always work everywhere you go. So sometimes you're constrained by resources. Sometimes you're constrained by, you know, even by your OKRs, but I structure my team at Warner extremely differently because of how we prioritize our work. And I think when you work in an organization that very strictly prioritizes, that's kind of the best thing you can get. And so I do a hybrid model. One, my ecosystem is interconnected. So if I'm making a DTC fan experience to connect fans to artists, or I'm making an experience where we give services to artists or songwriters, or I'm making internal tools that help power our music business, right? Where we're doing distribution or we're doing sync licensing or doing royalties reporting. All of those things actually share very similar components and you're sharing the same kind of information with all sorts of different kinds of users who have different needs, different personas, and sometimes different platforms, right? Some might be desktop, some might be native, et cetera, etc But my team needs to understand that entire ecosystem. So what I'll do is I will bring everyone together when we're doing our annual planning, and we'll do some visioning and try to leverage everyone's shared knowledge. Then as we go through the year, we tend to plan for half a year at Warner. So we will then decide where we're going to put a set of designers. And I also like to combine designers. So not having a sole designer in one area where we can sort of swarm and do more. Because a lot of what we're doing is actually doing zero to one or doing full redesigns of an area. And so when you have multiple designers working there, you actually can achieve some extra scale and extra speed there. And then I might move designers in the next half because I'm trying to cross pollinate what they know about a certain audience or certain platform in order to keep that sort of expertise around so that we're not siloed and only thinking about one user type since our ecosystem is connected.

Carlos Gonzalez de Villaumbrosia (07:50)
And what about the composition of those groups in terms of having some generalists versus some specialists? I hear the word design and as a known designer, I love to learn more about that.

Christina Goldschmidt (08:02)
Yeah, so I'm in charge of the whole UX team, which is product designers, designers on design systems, visual designers, content designers, researchers, and design operations. And so I have a mix of generalists and a product designer, but then I actually do have some of those specializations. And it's really important that you have that kind of generalist who can understand strategy, who can understand all of the functions and can be a jack of all trades who's delivering the majority of the work. But there are some times when you need to think, how am I going to decompose all of this into shared components? And so then a design systems designer can come in and partner on a project or can come in and do a whole update of the design system and pull out work in order to make it more usable for everybody else, or a visual designer might need to be there when we're making an experience very specific to one artist or one label, or to really push the envelope when we need to make something that's sexy and perfect for the music industry. There can be that need for these specialists, especially when you don't have a very specific design system, or when you're trying to achieve something that really helps get people excited. And also for us, the music industry is all marketing, is all visual. That goes with that music. And so people are used to seeing very high end visuals and we need to bring that excitement even to our internal business to business tools.

Carlos Gonzalez de Villaumbrosia (09:43)
There is a misconception, I think it's a hot topic happening in product, which is around product discovery and what is the real value that a product designer or a UX researcher is really bringing to the table. We saw it especially during the layoffs times when things go tough, a lot of companies say, hey, I don't really see the value of this, I'm just going to stop working with that many people. I'm just going to have maybe a product manager do a little bit of the discovery and that's pretty much it. So I think it would be very helpful to understand like how you're thinking about that and how can designers or UX researchers who are at the forefront and in touch with the customers can really be a business partner to the PM and not just someone reporting, you know, a survey and waiting for someone else to make the business decision.

Christina Goldschmidt (10:31) 
Yeah. So it depends on where you are in your life cycle, right? And how mature your business is and what kind of understanding you're trying to gain. So if you're in a very mature business where you're trying to drive optimizations, you could A, test something and try and get learnings that way. You may not know why, but you may know that something worked. If you need to know the why, or you need to know something before you make the investment, really doing that upfront research or that complimentary research is going to help and assist there. And if you're trying to make a big zero to one change, investing in a user researcher to help you do that so that you know when you're really going after something, you know that you've done the research work in order to know that you can trust that you didn't put bias in that approach. One of the things that I see is that, yes, everyone should be involved in speaking to the customer. Yes, everyone should be in research and understanding that and helping to move the product forward. But there are moments when you need the expertise of a researcher or designer who has a big research background in order to make decisions on that research. I love it when teams are collaborative, when they're trying to do evaluative work to say, what should we do next or which version of this feature should we move forward with? And even when we're doing full on discovery around what's the larger product market fit here. But sometimes you need that deeper expertise that's really going to help you have that clarity and confidence that you can move fast off of those research results that they weren't inducing bias that you use the right procedure so that you could get deep strategic insights and that you're not actually wasting your time, but that you're getting time back because you didn't go build a thing and then have it fail in market.

Carlos Gonzalez de Villaumbrosia (12:38)
So as you think about breaking down your roadmap into different themes, and there's some zero to one initiatives that maybe are higher risk because we've never done it before. And then there's some conviction around improvements that you need to make in your product, especially on such a large scale, knowing that making the thing that you have worked a little better can drive massive results. So how do you go about allocating your bets to ensure that there's also enough time for that zero to one long-term innovation.

Christina Goldschmidt (13:10)
Yeah, so I really trust in the OKR system that comes down across our entire company that helps us prioritize. So our CEO sets OKRs for the entire company and he actually helps to understand the objectives of all of the business units. And from there, we then prioritize what actually needs tech prioritization. And then from there, we prioritize what needs UX and design prioritization. And so we know that some things might actually require a little bit more design because they're zero to one and we're going to rapidly iterate and try something. And so that may not exactly meet the exact type of investment strategy of, we're going to put 10 % into our really out there ideas and we're going to put 70 % into our more optimization, keep the lights on work. But we know that we're putting things towards the prioritization that matters to our company and that matters to shareholders, that we as an entire company are aligned and laddered to what's appropriate. That, I think, is the best thing you can do as a corporate citizen.

Carlos Gonzalez de Villaumbrosia (14:26)
Yeah, and I'm picking on that because I think it's very important to elevate the role of designers, strategic partner and actually be in the room where OKRs are being created and give even design the voice to also co-create that instead of just receive the instruction and like someone in business made a decision now make it pretty.

Christina Goldschmidt (14:46)
Yeah. I agree. And so what's interesting is at not all levels of the company, does every department need to have OKRs? So at my level, some people do, some people don't for their particular department. Some people say, you're just going to have the project OKRs or the tech teams OKRs and ladder to that. I actually make sure that I write OKRs for my function that ladder up, because I want to be crystal clear that I have the line sight and the conviction and that my team knows exactly what we are working on so that there's no ambiguity that when the project needs to deliver, they know what part they are delivering and what their stretch goals are.

Carlos Gonzalez de Villaumbrosia (15:35)
And I know not everything is math and you actually made a comment at the ProductCon New York conference. At some point if you want, we can talk more about how we can use the mystical such as tarot to drive innovation. So I need to take you up on that. Please tell me more.

Christina Goldschmidt (15:52)
Yeah. So I've actually done so, so I teach about design thinking at NYU in their business school. I teach design thinking for managers and I've been using design thinking for decades. And also in my personal life, I've been on a deep sort of spiritual and healing journey that has exposed me to tons and tons and tons of different modalities, both in psychology and actually that started to go into the mystical. And what I ended up finding was that there's actually exact parallels between some mystical practices that allow you to access your subconscious that work in the same exact ways that psychological things work. And they just happen to be owned by the mystical. So some of those are shamanic journeying and breath work, which kind of follow similar lines of meditation or hypnosis or basically sort of inner journeying practices that follow the concept of liminal spaces. So one of the great things that you can do in design thinking is to actually stop thinking about the problem. I can solve pretty much any problem that's plexing me by going and taking a shower. Like I'll get an answer if I'm like, this is really hard. How am I gonna do this? I'm gonna stop thinking about it. I'm gonna go take a shower. And so that's something that I've learned that I can just like turn my brain off and I'll unconsciously process it. But I can do the same thing more actively if I try and do a shamanic journey or breath work. And then I can talk to my subconscious, which in those methodologies, they appear as maybe a helping spirit or an ancestor or some sort of other thing. And then I can talk through the problem with my subconscious or using tarot cards to look at my stakeholder map and say, what happens if I want to pursue this topic? How would that affect me? How would that affect the stakeholders? What do I think about that? It's very similar to sort of using drawing to process things, using association to process things. In design thinking, we oftentimes are smashing to unlike things to see what comes up in our brain association. But I think that there are these mystical practices that we could just own, take them out of the mystical if you wanna not believe in the mystical, but that actually are there to help drive creativity and drive understanding.

Carlos Gonzalez de Villaumbrosia (18:41)
That is incredible. When did you start learning more about this journey?

Christina Goldschmidt (18:49)
Yeah, so I would say I probably started maybe eight or so years ago because I'm someone who suffers from complex post-traumatic stress disorder and I was really looking for ways to help heal myself and to solve my anxiety. And I started working with my therapist and we would try all the conventional things. And then she was really open and she was like, try something else, try something else. And then I started working with a shamanic healer here in New York City. And I was like, wait a minute. And people were like, you're really good at this. And I was like, it's because it's the same thing as when I was doing this in design thinking over here. And so I kind of connected the dots that way. And now I start to teach people how to use these practices to talk to their subconscious, to just help them with decision-making. And actually this morning, I got a text from someone who said, I'm trying to decide between different jobs. Can I come see you on Sunday so that you can help me make some decisions? And so we're going to use a couple of these methodologies just so that they can access their subconscious and see what they think might be the best possible outcome.

Carlos Gonzalez de Villaumbrosia (20:06)
Oh my God, we need to do a separate session just on this topic to learn more about those practices and count how they can be applied to business context.

Christina Goldschmidt (20:14)
Yeah, yeah, I think it's something, and actually a lot of people are mystical and curious. When I was working at Etsy, there was sales data that every holiday season, things like tarot readings, like lunar moon pillows, all crystals, all of these products were popping in like the top 10 of what people were buying. So even though we don't normally talk about it in business, people are doing these things at home.

Carlos Gonzalez de Villaumbrosia (20:47)
So I don't even know what to say after this. Maybe one more on this topic. Can you give me a specific example on how you were able to use one of these practices to apply to a business context and what was the impact of it?

Christina Goldschmidt (21:03)
Yeah, absolutely. So I tend to use them more when dealing with people's issues than I am using it to say, how am I going to drive revenue today? But for me, I'm oftentimes using it to say, how am I going to choose the right way to approach a very sticky situation? Or how do I get insight into how to make sure I'm being supportive of everyone on my team for something? So for example, you know, it's been a really hard couple of years where we've had to make some difficult people challenging, challenging decisions. And how do we best support people to make the right decisions for both the business, but in support of people's careers. And I've done things like doing a breath work session in order to ask myself, what would be the most humane approach to helping someone with their personal problem and in the right business context and being able to talk about that internally? Or I've actually done things like helping people decide how to manage stakeholders better. So I once had someone come to me and say, I'm new on a team. I have this new leader and this is the context for it. What do I do right now? And then we were able to talk about this particular person, maybe feeling insecure about this topic. Have you actually been able to help them? Can you look at this X, Y, and Z? Or can you approach it this way? Or one of the members of my team during the pandemic had a choice of four different cities to move to. And for about six months, in our one-on-ones, was paralyzing him. It was the only thing he could think about because it was affecting his wife, his family. Every one-on-one we had, I couldn't decide where to move. You know, it's such a big decision, especially when things were scary during the pandemic. And so I was like, okay, order tarot cards, because we were remote from each other. And I asked him how to do a set of spreads where he could ask himself, what would happen if I moved to this city?

Christina Goldschmidt (23:28)
What would happen if I didn't move to this city? And we evaluated all four locations and we were able to choose for him to move to Birmingham, Alabama because it exposed for him what was the heart of the matter, which was that he needed to be around family, to be the most supportive of his kids so that, so they not only could get the best education, but they could have that best environment and that they could have additional childcare and that it would be the best thing for him and his wife. And so, and that changed the conversation he was having with his wife, and so that they were able to choose that location.

Carlos Gonzalez de Villaumbrosia (24:08)
It's so interesting how as a leader, the biggest challenges are probably not around technology or product or design, it's about people.

Christina Goldschmidt (24:16)
Yeah, it really is. It really is. And oftentimes, they're our biggest assets, you know? Yeah.

Carlos Gonzalez de Villaumbrosia (24:25)
Totally. Well, I thought I was advanced by doing some of the role playing with ChatGPT because I have long conversations, but this is a whole new level, Cristina.

Christina Goldschmidt (24:35)
Yeah, yeah, no, actually role playing with ChatGPT is really amazing. And it's another way to sort of prompt yourself with different prompts. And I honestly would say it's probably similar because when ChatGPT says something to you, your brain then says, I might touch on something I didn't think of. And that's all I'm trying to do here, right? It just helps your brain think to the side. Think about something you weren't thinking about before.

Carlos Gonzalez de Villaumbrosia (25:05)
So we've talked a lot about how designers can help products, how they can help the business. And that's been very helpful. Now I want to talk about how PMs can help you, can help designers. So tell me more about, you know, what is that idea, relationship? How can a product team be most helpful to your design team?

Christina Goldschmidt (25:29)
Yeah, I think it's number one being fully collaborative. So I think whenever, we do know that PMs are sort of the driving engine for being responsible for making sure that the team comes together, that the roadmap is set and that the work gets done and that they're kind of the final deciders for how we're approaching the whole thing, there's no refuting that that's kind of their role and that's their burden to bear in a sense, right? Like they have to make hard decisions. But I think what matters is really being collaborative, especially when looking to do things like set strategy. What we like to do at Warner is when we're looking at the higher level strategy is say, what is the art of the possible? How can we sketch and collaborate together to come up with wonderful ideas? How can we also get information out of users, out of all other stakeholders to help foster those ideas? And then now that we sort of have really gotten our creative juices going, now let's get tactical and say, how are we going to get there? What are we going to do today? What are we going to do tomorrow? And so I think having that mindset of knowing where everyone wants to go, because teams work really great when they have a vision that they're working towards, right? and allowing us to do what we do best in concert with what they do best, and so that we can help the team see where they need to go and hear the voice of the user as we're doing that, but then helping to make sure that we're doing it and getting there in the best way possible.

Carlos Gonzalez de Villaumbrosia (27:10)
And talking about the best way possible, I think that is where things get a little messy, right? Because everybody has an opinion on design, even if they are not designers. So how do you draw that boundary and kind of acknowledge that you got the input, but you can, if you really were invited into the room, you can also really take the lead on the show.

Christina Goldschmidt (27:18)
Yeah, so we do back up our design work with data, right? And granted, not all of it is statistically significant data, right? Some of it is user tested data. Some of it is existing known patterns. And some of it is actually how humans process design or process experiences. And so when there are things that are subjective, but then there are things that are, these are the right ways to do a thing because they are more accessible, because they are more usable, because they fit into a way that a certain culture processes information, because they are following a known set of patterns that if you were to break that, you would actually drive down the time to complete a task or something like that. It's about understanding what is the problem that we're trying to solve and is the design that you're commenting on taking into account all of those topics or is it actually talking about a subjective topic, right? And so as a design leader, it's my job to have the voice where I can actually have the conversation about all of those things. Junior designers or maybe not as experienced design leaders don't necessarily have the vocabulary, which is unfortunate, to have the dialogue. But my hope is that over time, I can help grow the field to always be able to have that dialogue. And that over time, we can also have our fellow collaborators and cross-functional peers believe us when we say, this is right because of X, Y, and Z reasons. 

Carlos Gonzalez de Villaumbrosia (29:33)
Yeah, and you use that term data-driven design, and I think it's very powerful because it almost brings everybody to the same goal. It doesn't assume that a designer doesn't bring the data and needs someone to bring the data.

Christina Goldschmidt (29:46)
Yeah, yeah, absolutely. And, you know, don't get me wrong. I'm gonna say that not every designer is your ideal designer, right? You have to do the job of hiring the right team that works in the right environment and can support their work with data. And so in that you have a leadership structure that believes in that, that approaches that, that isn't just making subjective, cool decisions. But there's a whole ton of us out there, the majority of us out there understand that the goal of product design is to combine user and business needs, to make decisions based on data, to actually achieve those goals, that those constraints make our work better. And so that's, think, what you need to look for and hire for to make sure you're working with the right people.

Carlos Gonzalez de Villaumbrosia (30:37)
So you mentioned that you were a front end developer and you also did product, now you do design, so you all have that extra level of empathy for the different roles. A lot of PMs do not come from a design background, yet they think they know design, right? Just because we've all been exposed to products and understand the patterns that make certain metrics go up. So assuming that a PM, obviously doesn't have the time or even the need to become a designer. What would be the thing that they would probably want to invest in in order to be a more effective partner to design right now?

Christina Goldschmidt (31:18)
I would actually say, I know you're asking me for a technical answer, but I would actually say invest in the relationship with your design partner. Because you want to be able to have an open dialogue and conversation, and you want to be able to learn from that design partner and say, well, educate me, why did you do this? Why are you making these choices so that I can be a better partner to you? You know, please don't do it in a combative way. But really start to partner with them because the exchange of ideas is honestly how most like design is honestly transferred best as an apprenticeship. So there's not like there's a baseline of work that you can learn through school and through study. But the really great designers out there we've learned from other great designers and on the job. Technically, we're learning from users because we're repeatedly over and over and over again in user testing, seeing results of A-B testing, we're getting data that informs this is how it works. And so having that dialogue to understand why did you do this? How did you approach it? Why do you think that this is what works? Let's dissect why this won. Those dialogues are actually what's going to really help understand design.

Carlos Gonzalez de Villaumbrosia (32:48)
I like your answer because it's such a good reminder that if we are asking design teams to be more data-driven, to participate in the conversation at the strategic level, to be accountable for business outcomes and not just the user experience, it's also important to, as a PM, as a product leader, to be accountable for, to be aware that we also need to be curious and ask open-ended questions and truly approach this as a beginner with a beginning mindset because ultimately, those patterns that we sometimes recognize as successful can go against us, yes, because we assume that's the only way to do something.

Christina Goldschmidt (33:25)
Yeah, no, thank you. I'm glad that that resonated with you.

Carlos Gonzalez de Villaumbrosia (33:29)
Well, Cristina, it's been a pleasure to have you on the podcast. Thank you so much for sharing your insights.

Christina Goldschmidt (33:36)
Yeah, thanks so much for having me. It was really great to chat with you, Carlos.