Maya Prohovnik
Maya Prohovnik is currently Spotify’s Head of Podcast Product. She was employee #1 at Anchor, which was acquired by Spotify in 2019 and now powers more than 80% of all new podcasts created in the world. In 2023, Maya was named one of the Most Important People in Podcasting by The Hollywood Reporter.
Career Skills
The transition from startup founder to large-company executive often involves a difficult psychological shift and loss of identity.
"I think that people who get acquired, especially founders, actually go through a relatively deep depression and existential crisis after getting acquired... you're like, wait, what is my job now?"
The guest discusses specific systems for managing high-volume leadership roles, including task management and mental clarity techniques.
"I write everything down because I think I'm one of those people I remember things best when they're written down and then I obsessively put things on my to-do list."
Communication Skills
Successful public speaking relies on reframing physiological stress as helpful energy and committing to rigorous rehearsal.
"Reframing that anxiety to understand that the thing your body is doing is surging you with adrenaline to help you. And so letting that feeling wash over you instead of fighting it, I think has been so..."
Growth Skills
Product-market fit should be measured against the ultimate mission and scale potential, not just current user satisfaction.
"We had this feeling... that it just wasn't ever going to be big enough. And so we had this really interesting moment where the users were all telling us, there's no problem. We love this product. They..."
Hiring & Teams Skills
Maintaining original startup values within a larger organization helps preserve team identity and operational speed.
"When we were a startup, one of the first things we did when we were only a few people, we decided what our core values were going to be. And I think they maybe very trivially have changed over the yea..."
Leadership Skills
Effective feedback requires a balance of deep personal care and direct challenge to be constructive.
"The big one for me is Radical Candor... you need to care personally and challenge directly. If you're only doing one of those things, you're not giving feedback in an effective way."
Using a structured framework to categorize tasks helps leaders decide what to handle personally and what to offload.
"The one other one I refer to often is I love the Eisenhower Matrix, which is also known as the four Ds. So it's do, defer, delegate, delete... I write everything down at the end of every day, I go thr..."
Effective decision-making treats intuition as a valid data point that must be objectively explained to stakeholders.
"I think where people get into trouble is when they think that they can rely solely on the data... I would think of your gut actually as a type of data and I think it's a totally valid one and it's jus..."
Product Management Skills
The guest emphasizes dogfooding as a core leadership philosophy, requiring her entire team to become creators to deeply understand user pain points.
"I am constantly yelling at my product team who do not have podcasts and being like, I really don't think that you can build the right things. If they talk to users all the time, they see the data, but..."