Dear Design,

In 2012, I led a redesign at Spotify. After twelve months, it was cancelled.

The project was called Forward, and it was ambitious. Spotify from scratch. Just two of us—my partner and I—in our own space, away from the noise of everyday product work. We had no distractions, no baggage. Our job was clear: build the perfect “Spotify 2.0.”

We worked hard. People were excited to see it. But when the time came, we couldn’t find a way back into reality. Designing “outside the box” had freed us creatively but detached us from what was real. Roadmaps, partnerships, ad deals, algorithms—these aren’t things you can just erase and redraw, as easily as we did in prototypes. Our shiny new vision frightened the very teams we needed to inspire.

“Design is easy. People are hard.”

We had designed for a perfect world instead of the real one. We had forgotten the most important constraint of all: how will we actually build this?

“Design depends largely on constraints.” —Charles Eames

The project ended in the summer of 2013. My partner quit. I rejoined a design team that had tripled in size while I was away. Two things quickly became obvious: the team was talented, but their work didn’t reflect it. We hadn’t failed because of lack of skill, but because of where we’d focused that skill.

I realised something simple: the way forward wasn’t outside the box. It was firmly inside. By working within real-world constraints, we could fix the problems behind the scenes and amplify the talent of the team. We could create work that mattered—and lasted.

This insight changed my whole focus. I stopped thinking about the perfect redesign and started asking how we could scale great design at Spotify. I wrote more about that journey in Design Doesn’t Scale.