A selection of engagements across financial services, technology, and niche industries — showing how the framework plays out in practice.
After years of exponential growth, Spotify faced a different kind of challenge — not acquiring users, but converting them. The free tier was vast, but the path to premium wasn't clear, and growth had begun to plateau. The question was why.
The work started with a developmental lens: rather than treating the user base as a fixed population with a fixed conversion rate, we mapped how people's relationship with music actually evolves — from passive listening through active discovery to genuine investment in the experience. This produced a four-stage engagement typology, each with distinct behaviours, motivations, and friction points.
What emerged was a reframe: premium subscribers weren't simply the portion of the population willing to pay. They were users who had reached a stage of engagement where the free tier no longer matched what they needed. The implication was significant — grow engagement depth in free, and premium conversion follows. The free tier wasn't a revenue ceiling. It was a development pathway.
The segmentation fed directly into product strategy. For each stage, we outlined what the product should offer, what frictions to remove, and what signals indicated readiness to move. Editorial curation and algorithmically-generated playlists were identified as critical tools — not just for engagement, but for accelerating progression through the stages. Helping a listener discover they care about music at a deeper level is the precondition for everything else.
The framework also opened up a longer-term view: higher tiers built around richer listening experiences, more sophisticated tools, and deeper editorial voice — categories that didn't yet exist but had a clear developmental logic behind them.
From: what percentage of users will pay? To: how do we grow the number of users for whom paying is the obvious next step?