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This reads to me like "the darn developers are spending too much time not laser-focused on business impact and keep bikeshedding and doing make-work!"

It's impossible to tell if this is what's happening though. It can really go either way.

I've seen orgs where the perf-review meat grinder is driven so tight that engineers are essentially punished/PIPd for doing things that NEED to happen even if they aren't sexy business impact. Like upgrading library versions (not all of them, just the core/most important ones!) so you don't wake up one day and realize you're on a 6 year old version of a core library/framework. Even remediating incidents was treated as "not impactful work". This resulted in the expected shitstorm and teams were literally churning employees because oncall was so bad and just doing anything was so awful, and it took a staff engineer's guile just to get an otherwise-relatively-simple project over the line because you had to be a ninja just to navigate the awful existing mess of 10 years' worth of laser-focus on business impact.

And I've seen orgs where the engineers run rampant, doing random side-quests constantly, junior engineers run amok over-architecting every project with all of the skills their CS degrees gave them, senior engineers make magnum opuses of medium-sized projects, and principal engineers pontificate and aid and abet any and all architecture-astronauting that anyone else in the org does. And naturally none of it was done in any way shape or form in coordination with product.

And naturally there's everything in between. So whether they have a healthy amount of focus on non-sexy work and wish they were neglecting it more to reap shorter-term product-focused gains, or they have too much bikeshedding and they want to be more product-focused, it is difficult to say.

(Naturally the cynic in me says it is probably the former, though...)

> laser-focused on business impact

If you only knew the PTSD that the expression "laser-focused" is triggering. From an organization that had 12 focuses per quarter, and as many "core-priorities".

> We're left to guess what this means. What's work around the work? If that work is now unsavory, why can't they work on work rather than around it? Is this describing reducing the management layer? (support) or customer/partner support? Will they be replaced by automation? I get you don't want to go into specifics of who's let go, but then don't pretend you're providing a clear analysis, and don't give a washed out business lingo salad instead.

> TBH I don't see what changed on Spotify for a customer perspective in the past few years. I still see bugs I reported years ago, the UI is largely the same.

He didn't get into it because you answered it yourself. And anyone who has used it for a while has most likely the same initial thought.

Frankly I think the UI has gotten consistently worse. Playing saved/liked (Spotify keeps changing the word) songs from a specific artist is still very hard and convoluted. "Now Playing" pop-up panel on desktop was a feature no one asked for. "Your Library" revamp was confusing and solely for the purpose to push podcasts which somehow made it harder to view the podcasts I actually follow. Then comes the dreadful rounded corners on everything but also weird empty spaces around the UI resulting in wasted screen real estate. I held onto Google Play Music until its very last moment, all because of Spotify's dreadful UI.