Spotify is introducing a new platform for software development teams based on its own internal tools. ‘Confidence’ is designed to make it easy to run A/B testing.
“Spotify’s data scientists and engineers have been developing and honing our product testing methods for years,” begins the Spotify blog post announcing the new platform. “Whether it’s automatically coordinating simultaneous A/B tests or orchestrating the rollout of an AI recommendation system across mobile, desktop, and web; the platform we built scales experimentation best practices and capabilities to all our teams. Soon this experimentation platform will be available to any company that wants to build, test, and iterate ideas the way we do at Spotify—quickly, reliably, and with confidence.”
Confidence is designed to be an easy platform for software development teams to get feedback with quick A/B testing. Spotify says the tool was built out from its own data scientists and engineers needs as they conducted A/B testing internally at the DSP. While the tests were manual and error-prone, Spotify wanted to improve the process. It built its own internal A/B testing platform, which it dubbed ABBA.
This development highlights how Spotify is looking to branch out beyond just its consumer-facing DSP service. In December 2022, Spotify unveiled another developer-centric project called Backstage. It’s a platform designed to help companies get their infrastructure in order by allowing customized developer portals that combine data, services, APIs, and documentation in a single interface.
Spotify says it took everything it learned in building ABBA and started over, which is Confidence. Confidence features new tools and incorporates more advanced testing methods, while automating some scientific best practices to make it easier for dev teams to set up controlled experiments. “By the time we turned off ABBA in 2020, we’d gone from running hundreds of experiments to running thousands of experiments per year across virtually every aspect of our business,” Spotify says.